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The article focuses on the paper "British sociology and public intellectuals: consumer society and imperial decline," by Bryan Turner. Philippe Fontaine reviews the fact that sociologist have failed to document the gradual fall Great Britain from world power status, and discusses R. W. Cornell's views on the connection between empire and sociology. The anti-intellectual sentiment seen by Turner in Great Britain is critiqued, as well as Turner's insistence that social scientists chose certain topics to structure their investigations.

This article presents guidelines to contributors of the "British Journal of Sociology." Papers submitted for publication are normally read by at least two assessors as well as by one of the Editors. The Editor's decision will be final. Articles submitted to the journal should be an original piece of work, not been published before, and not being considered for publication elsewhere in its final form either in printed or electronic form.

This paper comments on the article "Appliances and Their Impact: The Ownership of Domestic Technology and Time Spent on Household Work," published in the September 2004 issue of "The British Journal of Sociology." The authors of the previous article reopen the old controversy over the domestic labor paradox. They deploy evidence which directly connects household ownership of domestic equipment to household members' time allocations, suggesting paradoxically that possession of household equipment in effect adds to domestic labor rather than reducing it. However, it is observed that there is a methodological trap, a confusing evidence of cross-sectional differences between people for historical change in people's behavior.

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]

The connection between social class and political preferences is among the most well established in the social sciences. This association is typically taken as prima facie evidence of economic self‐interest: Classes hold different attitudes, values, and party preferences because they have different economic interests. However, this assumption has rarely been tested empirically. In this article, we use survey data from 18 West European countries to examine why classes differ on a central aspect of political preferences, namely their views on the desirability of income inequality. We find that only a moderate proportion of differences between employee classes in support for redistribution can be accounted for by contemporary differences in resources and risks; differences in economic interests to some degree account for the anti‐redistributive preferences of the professional middle classes compared with the working class. However, the preferences of the self‐employed have a different explanation; autonomy is a better explanation of the right‐wing preferences of the self‐employed compared with the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the extent to which parental values differ between social groups in the UK at the start of the twenty‐first century. The study of parental values is an important area of sociological enquiry that can inform scholarship from across the social sciences concerned with educational inequality and cultural variability in family life. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show how parent's social class, religion, religiosity, race and ethnicity, and education are related to the qualities they would like their children to have. Our rank‐ordered regression models show that parents in service class occupations place significantly more importance on 'thinking for self' than 'obey parents' compared to those in routine manual occupations. We also show that although class matters, the relationship between education and parental values is particularly strong. Parenting values also differ by parental racial and ethnic background and by levels of religiosity. [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.

In this essay I want to address two question marks which arose during my reading of Michael Burawoy's inspiring piece. First, sharing his spirit of recreating the sociological enlightenment by differentiating between different types of public sociologies, I do not share his optimism that sociology can easily become an integral part of public discourse and practice. Second, I don’t think that mainstream sociology is really prepared for this adventure. My argument points in the opposite direction: all the different forms of public and non-public sociology are in danger of becoming museum pieces. Thus, sociology not only needs a public voice, it also needs to be reinvented first – in order to have a public voice at all! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on Michael Burawoy's article "For Public Sociology," in volume 56, issue number 2, of the "British Journal of Sociology." Michael Burawoy has presented 11 theses on public sociology. Some of his main claims can be summarized in three statements: public sociology is part of a four-fold bundle of disciplinary activities; public sociology is important and should be made stronger and developed as an integrated part of the discipline; and public sociology requires well functioning publics. Comments are made on: academic institutions as bundles of activities; the nature of public sociology; and why and how dissemination and public discourse should be made stronger.

This article comments on Michael Burawoy's article "For Public Sociology," in volume 56, issue number 2, of the "British Journal of Sociology." Focus is made on two aspects of Burawoy's arguments which would be inaccurate if they were directed to the international community of sociologists: the division of social labor or functional differentiation among the four sociologies; and the nature of the friction among them. Thus, while Michael Burawoy's challenge to sociologists to think constructively and critically about sociology is timely and welcome, his ideas should be discussed in the context of the geographical breadth of the discipline.

This article points out that Michael Burawoy's call for a renewal of commitment to a public sociology has had a massive impact. Writing in the tradition of C. Wright Mills's clarion call, Burawoy seeks to defend the critical and reflexive role of the sociologist through his or her autonomous engagement in the public sphere of political decision. His argument has had a mixed reception in the United States. For the most part his views have been welcomed as re-emphasizing an important dimension of sociological activity that has, perhaps, been lost or submerged in the current political and financial climate of conservatism and retrenchment. Within the universities, many have found it easier to keep their heads down and get on with purely academic work, lest political involvement bring unwanted attention. Burawoy has been seen as re-asserting the political legitimacy of public participation. In some quarters, however, his views have met with a more negative reaction and have been seen as a scarcely concealed attempt to abandon impartiality and to advocate a leftist radicalism. This mixed reception was, perhaps, inevitable, given the political context in which Burawoy has intervened. He is, necessarily, critical of sociologists, other social scientists, the universities and the other institutions for which sociologists work, and also the wider structures of power in which these are enmeshed.

This article responds to Craig Calhoun and other critics of the author by defending the seriousness and coherence of public sociology as a distinct realm within a national and global disciplinary division of sociological labor, and as an antidote to external subversion. Two visions of the public sociologist are two visions of social change; the one riding on the claimed universality of intellectuals, the other riding on the organization of subaltern groups. For the traditional public sociologist the privileged site is the university, while civil society is the locus of misrecognized suffering; for the organic public sociologist civil society is the source of insight into what is and what could be, insight excavated and elaborated by the sociologist. This gives two divergent visions and divisions of sociology as a field of power. In the conception of traditional public sociology the danger comes from the invading forces of mass media, consultantships, technocracy, commodification and politicization of the university, refracted within the field of sociology as the subjugation of the academic to the extraacademic. In the conception of the organic public sociology domination appears as rationalization. Here the danger comes from science itself, such as neoliberal economics that imposes a singular model on all, precisely because it does not acknowledge the critique of its theoretical foundations or the lived experience of the people its theorizes.

Criminologists display a largely unexamined propensity to ignore writings that are more than fifteen or so years old, with evident consequences for the public presentation and validation of expert knowledge. A citation study was combined with detailed observations from British criminologists to ascertain quite how that disavowal of the past was accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the appearance of Vanek's pioneering article in 1974, there has been a controversy about whether ‘labour saving’ domestic appliances actually save labour time. Vanek argued that time spent in housework had barely changed since 1926, despite the diffusion of practically every known domestic appliance over this period. Gershuny and Robinson challenge Vanek's ‘constancy of housework’ thesis, arguing that, between 1965 and 1985, domestic technology has significantly reduced the weekly hours of women's routine housework. Although there is much talking past each other, none of the protagonists in this dispute have any direct data about which households own or do not own domestic appliances. Instead, they all rely on the passage of the years as a proxy for ownership of domestic appliances, since a higher proportion of contemporary households now own domestic appliances. The Australian 1997 Time Use Survey (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1998b) is rare among official surveys, as it simultaneously provides detailed information on time spent in housework and an inventory of household appliances. The analysis of this data show that domestic technology rarely reduces women's unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produces some increases in domestic labour. The domestic division of labour by gender remains remarkably resistant to technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that in the historical transformation to modern industrial society, the integration of women into the economy occurred everywhere as a three-phase process: in pre-modern societies, the extensive integration of women into societal production; then, their wide exclusion with the shift to industrial society; and finally, their re-integration into paid work during the further course of modernization. Results from the author's own international comparative study of the historical development of the family and the economic integration of women have shown that this was decidedly not the case even for western Europe. Hence the question arises: why is there such historical variation in the development and importance of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family? In the article, an explanation is presented. It is argued that the historical development of the urban bourgeoisie was especially significant for the historical destiny of this cultural model: the social and political strength of the urban bourgeoisie had central societal importance in the imposition of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family as the dominant family form in a given society. In this, it is necessary to distinguish between the imposition of the breadwinner marriage at the cultural level on the one hand, and at the level of social practice in the family on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The career experience of men and women in British university sociology since 1950 is compared, using published data for the whole group and fresh data from a sample of departments. It is shown that, when like is compared with like, the outcomes for men and for women have not been as different as is often suggested; family reasons were more salient in women's careers, but in the end have not made much difference to their destinations. But the proportions of women recruited have varied over time, and the experience of both sexes has been strongly influenced by historical factors affecting different periods. Within the constraints which those have imposed, individuals have not all made the same choices, and that too has affected the outcomes.

The article examines the proposition that twinship is an irreducibly social phenomenon. Gender, age, birth order, socio-economic status and other variables are considered, along with the role of different patterns of socialization as these affect twinship. It is argued that, to a very large extent, from conception. through gestation, childbirth and subsequently childhood and adolescence, the social processing and regulation of social members take place in unitary terms and that therefore twins (and higher multiples) are an anomaly in relation to such processes. Twins' reactions to stigma, stereotyping and labelling are explored as an integral aspect of the social structuring of twinship. The role of the twin, as distinct from the role of the non-twin, is examined in the context of cultural expectations of twinship regarding similarity of identity and similarity of behaviour. Subsequent or concurrent processes of differentiation between twins are also examined. The article concludes with suggestions for further analyses of twinship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of the interdisciplinary enterprise of historical sociology commonly contend that the narrational accounts of past social phenomena provided by historians are inadequate to the task of theory-building and testing. In support of this negative assessment, opponents will adduce informational deficiencies in the available data (the standard positivist appraisal of historical evidence), or cite the interpretive anarchy that seemingly prevails at the narrative phase of emplotment (the skeptical, postmodernist contention that historiographic texts ‘construct’ rather than veridically represent the events they artfully contrive to signify). Both of these lines of criticism are unbalanced, and therefore seriously misleading as regards the epistemic foundations of historical-sociological inquiry. The ‘social authenticity’ and ‘informational density’ of historical evidence does allow for veridical reconstructions of the past, while the reflexive interpretive protocols of source criticism and the sociology of knowledge can be deployed to provide warrant for discriminating arbitrations between competing theories and narratives. The various epistemological deformations in the study of human affairs that have been encouraged by the old idiographic-nomothetic polarity — chronic ahistoricism within the social sciences, the atheoretical predilections of much conventional historiography — are rectifiable through the consolidation of a fully integrated sociological history, a unified and inclusive historical social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century's end given its traditions and lineages. These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity. Each one of these trends has its own specific conditionalities, contents and consequences for cities, and for theory and research. Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct, often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting. The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology. Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Second age of modernity' is a magical password that is meant to open the doors to new conceptual landscapes. The whole world of nation sovereignty is fading away - including the 'container theory of society' on which most of the sociology of the first age of modernity is based upon. In this article I propose a distinction between 'simple globalization' and 'reflexive cosmopolitization'. In the paradigm of the first age of modernity, simple globalization is interpreted within the territorial compass of state and politics, society and culture. This involves an additive, not substitutive, conception of globalization as indicated for example by 'interconnectedness'. In the paradigm of the second age of modernity globalization changes not only the relations between and beyond national states and societies, but also the inner quality of the social and political itself which is indicated by more or less reflexive cosmopolitization as an institutionalized learning process - and its enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of the next century is likely to differ from that of the twentieth century. The current situation and the future prospects of sociology are assessed by spelling out the trajectory over the past century of sociology's predominant assumptions about the character and direction of the social world and of its own task of cognition. Sociology is located in three spaces of identity: a space of disciplines, a stage of everyday practice, and a space of imagination and investigation. From the cosmological, epistemological, and spatial trajectories some indications of a new, very different future of sociology are given. Finally, a way of preserving and developing the legacy of first century sociology is presented, in the form of nodes of knowledge, central to a 'typical' sociological approach to the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the 'social problem' of fear of crime in the criminological and sociological literature in recent years. We would argue that thus far in this literature, however, there has been too much emphasis on the question 'How rational is people's fear of crime?', a question that largely reduces the complexity of the phenomenon and positions a 'biased' lay response against an 'expert' objective judgment. In this article, we review different epistemological perspectives that can be offered to understand in greater depth the fear of crime phenomenon. We place particular emphasis on those hermeneutic perspectives that go beyond the models of the rationalist, individualistic subject to exploring issues of symbolic representation, discourse and the micro- and macro-contexts in which fear of crime is experienced and given meaning. We also draw upon two case studies from our own empirical research into fear of crime, conducted with the intention of exploring the situated narratives, cultural representations and different levels of symbolic meaning that contribute to the dynamic constitution of fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.