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In this paper the emergence of Cultural Studies is traced and its current place in British intellectual life assessed. Throughout a comparison is drawn between Cultural Studies and British Sociology. In the first part of the paper the 'original curriculum' of Cultural Studies is analysed in its making of a sharp break from previous disciplinary practices. The foundation of Cultural Studies on theoretically defined grounds is then described. In the second part of the paper the changes in Cultural Studies since its inception are described and the current critical potential of the practice assessed, On a pessimistic note the paper ends by noting the threat to the survival of Cultural Studies from the current round of rationalizations of British Higher Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholarship and campaigning have been notably successful in recent years in putting the concept of the unpaid carer onto the public agenda. The caring that women do as a feature of paid work, however, has proved a more intractable topic. This paper argues that masculinist visions gender the concepts of bureaucracy and profession. dichotomizing competence and care, and masking both the reality and the potential of public carework. The paper proposes a distinction between caregiving, carework and professional care. It then develops an analysis of professional care by reference to a recent campaign by the leading nurses' organization in the UK, seeking to highlight the worth of nursing work. It notes that the carework discussion has barely any echo in the debate about the 'new managerialism' in the public sector and argues that a critical understanding of the centrality of binary gendered thought is crucial to a constructive critique of today's emphasis on bringing health care into the market-place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent developments in income inequality in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to describing cross-national variation in changes in income inequality, the paper examines different explanatory factors for these recent developments. The findings reported indicate that there is substantial cross-national variation, not only with regard to the level of inequality, but furthermore with regard to changes in inequality. The results indicate that the equalizing effect of welfare state redistribution did not decrease in all countries. By contrast, in all countries there was a universal tendency towards increased inequality in the pre-tax and transfer distribution, although the magnitude of the change differs from country to country. Even though a polarization of the earnings distribution is reported, the results still give no support to cross-national convergence with regard to income inequality during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents an attempt to compare the incidence of relative deprivation and poverty in Sweden and Great Britain. The study goes beyond the limitations of traditional income-based comparisons and the method applied builds on Mack & Lansley's (1985) direct consensual definition of deprivation. The analyses show that deprivation is more prevalent and more unevenly distributed in Britain compared with Sweden. However, more detailed analyses reveal that the probability of being poor is distributed in a similar way in the two countries. Low income households, the unemployed, those dependent on means-tested benefits and lone parents are worse off in both countries. Thus, it is very much the same processes that generate deprivation and poverty. However, Swedes are less deprived because incomes have been distributed more equally, unemployment has been lower, means-tested benefits have been more generous, and the situation for lone parents has been better in Sweden than in Britain during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the 'new' sociology of education with respect to the study of learning environments. While borrowing much from the interpretive schools, such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and Marxism, the new paradigm has emerged in Britain partly as a reaction to the lack of success of earlier reform policies based on traditional research. It promises to advance understanding of educational processes related to classroom interaction, classroom language, and the curriculum. At the same time, ambiguous theoretical links, an implicit positivism, and unresolved relativism toward policy formulation weaken its appeal. Rather than replacing the traditional sociology of education, the new paradigm complements it both theoretically and empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses one of the most significant gaps in the analysis of contemporary capitalist society. This particular gap in theoretical knowledge is not one that has been compensated for by adequate descriptive accounts. In the "Manifesto" it is maintained that the nature of future class relations will more and more closely resemble those relationships found in the new capitalist city and workplace in Great Britain in the middle of the 19th century. The lines of conflict between the capitalists and the workers will be transformed and will transform itself into a class-for-itself. In so doing it will have created the conditions for the dissolution of all classes. The involvement of the worker in the capitalist workplace has not normally generated a resolution of the differences within the working class but has rather increased fragmentation, nor does it generally produce anything but trade union consciousness. Capital is an attempt to characterize at the level of thought the basic system of related scientific concepts which fit together to give us our theory of the structure of the capitalist mode. The relationship between labor and capital is structured through the appropriation of the surplus value created by the worker's labor.

This article compares the reduction of income inequality in Sweden and the United Kingdom over the periods of 1920-1969 and 1880-1969 respectively. The independent variables used by Cutright were reduced by factor analysis to two dimensions. The first measures the availability of an economic surplus and the second measures concentration of power in the hands of an elite. Each was found to have significant effects on the level of income inequality in the two countries. The power factor was more important in explaining inequality in both countries for the total time period, as might be expected from Lenski's discussion of stratification. A division of the United Kingdom sample into equal halves showed a pattern of transformation with the power factor being important in the first half and the economic surplus factor in the second. From this, inferences concerning the nature of inequality in post-industrial societies are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]