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The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is an important indicator of the increased global importance of education. It defines the goal of education at the level of the child rather than the state, the community or household. The requirement that each child be treated as an individual who can expect to see their 'personality, talents and mental and physical abilities' fully developed, is an example of the individualism which features in three important theoretical paradigms for understanding the rise of education and training. We compare accounts of the global growth of education produced by functionalism, neoinstitutionalism and political economy with the help of qualitative research on children's experience of parental influences. The research is drawn from semi-structured interviews with millennial graduates in Portugal, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It reveals weaknesses in the paradigms which are related to the way each theorises individualism and the role it plays in parental influence on education. The functionalist and neoinstitutionalist conceptions of individualism limit the usefulness of these paradigms for understanding changes in the way families around the world prepare children for education. The political economy paradigm is more promising; however, an approach which identifies only one, neoliberal, version of individualism has limited purchase on international differences in parental influences and the way these influences are changing. An approach which can draw on the contrast between a cognitive individualism associated with neoliberalism, and sentimental individualism which originates in social movements, is more promising.

Case studies from longitudinal research on adult educational participation identified important determinants of lifelong learning patterns: age, place, gender, family background, and religion. The data suggest that adults' learning choices are made within the framework of subjective opportunity structures, including notions of what is appropriate for individuals. (Contains 43 references.) (SK)

Based on research in South Wales, a sociological theory of participation in education and training is developed, identifying types of orientations: functional avoidance, instrumental credentialism, and vocational transformation. The inclusion of sociological insights in human-capital development policy is recommended. (SK)

Analysis of patterns of participation of 1,104 adults in South Wales shows that socioeconomic background, more than educational attainment, plays a crucial role in educational participation. Over time, immediate and later patterns of participation are determined by separate influences. (SK)

A survey in Wales suggests that though the more privileged have more success in school, the successful stay on in education, and the highly educated more often receive training in work.Changes in opportunity and society, differences between genders, and variations between regions also determine participation in adult education. (PEN)

Analysis of education and training histories of 1,104 adults in Wales identified patterns of participation as lifelong trajectories. Key predictors of participation emerged: period when born, place of birth, gender, family background, and initial schooling. Results called into question the rhetoric about progress toward a Learning Society and the link between education and economic advancement. (SK)

In Britain, the notion of the Learning Society is advocated as an investment in economic development and a way to improve access to education. Study of adult-education participation in South Wales over 50 years suggests that the Learning Society is a rhetorical device that masks the lack of real progress toward widespread inclusion and access to education. (SK)

Education and training histories of 1,104 British respondents ages 15-65 identified them as nonparticipants, delayed, transitional, or lifetime. Social determinants of adult participation were identified. Immediate postcompulsory education and training is predicted by more privileged family background. Later lifelong learning is more dependent on changing opportunities, motivation, and identity. (SK)

This study is concerned with the substantive representation of non-human species in parliamentary business. It applies Leston-Bandeira's legislative functions perspective (LFP) to a data set of 2500 public petitions on animal welfare, submitted over three terms of the UK parliament. The wider significance of this work lies in: (i) underlining the utility of the LFP to petitions analysis; (ii) showing that, while few directly secure policy change, e-petitions perform valuable legislative functions including campaigning, scrutiny and policy-influencing roles, foremost of which is linkage and fostering citizen engagement in parliamentary business. And (iii) Showing how, over the past decade, public petitions have significantly contributed to the increasing salience of animal welfare in UK politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Descriptive representation occurs when elected politicians are typical of the larger class of persons that they represent, such that blacks represent blacks, disabled people represent disabled people and so on. Research undertaken in the context of the UK government's devolution programme helps us to judge the strength of the demand for descripted representation amongst political activists and elites. In the case of women, one grouping where proportional descriptive representation has (almost) been achieved, substantial benefits are perceived, for example in relation to improvements in the deliverative function of democracy. In the case of other 'minority' groupings the absence of descriptive representation is thought to have entailed significant costs. This failure has necessitated the development of complex bureaucratic structures that are seen as a poor substitute for descriptive representation. In this and other respects the innovations in governance introduced with devolution have helped to stimulate demand for descriptive representation. This demand exceeds the supply of representation on offer and descriptive representation will be the focus of an increasing amount of debate and controversy in future.

This study explores the party politicization of animal welfare in the context of multi-level governance in the UK. It examines over 1300 pledges in party manifestos for Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elections 1998–2017. It reveals the nature of party competition, including increasing salience over electoral cycles. This is complemented by examination of the party dynamics in two sub-fields: wildlife protection and farm animal welfare. The wider significance of this study lies in showing how the move to multi-level electoral politics provides new political spaces to advance animal welfare and how meso-ballots are increasingly attuned to the symbiosis of humans and animals. These factors are driving the territorialization of policy and leading to distinctive animal welfare regimes in the different countries of the UK. In addition, partisan theory reveals how the electoral politics of animal welfare varies between sub-fields and is shaped by parties' relationships with different policy communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mila's story can help you understand what the point of sociological theory is and it shows you how you can learn theory, use it and criticise it. In this specially [...]

This paper develops an explanation for the simultaneous surge in support of both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary nationalism in North West Wales. Close analysis of the way in which the concept 'community' is used within the process of political mobilisation provides the key to this understanding. By demonstrating that a number of social constructions of community co-exist within the same social space (in this instance, North West Wales), the paper contributes an added dimension to the understandings of community current within sociology. The paper identifies four social constructions of community, each relating to a different variant of Nationalist ideology. The capacity within the concept community to legitimate a locality simultaneously as a place of resistance and of conflict is demonstrated to be central to the explanation for the dual rise in nationalist support.

Everyone knows about the historic decline of the UK economy from its nineteenth century position of prominence, but the very recent evidence of decline is more striking. In 1961 the [...]

This article summarizes the findings of a representative study of illtreatment in the British workplace. Using evidence drawn from nearly 4,000 inhome, face-to-face interviews and backed up by four organizational case studies, the article illustrates how workplace ill-treatment falls into three distinct, but overlapping, categories. Just under half the British workforce experienced unreasonable treatment at work over a two year period while forty per cent of employees experienced incivility or disrespect. Violence and injury is less common than other types of ill treatment but was still experienced by the equivalent of over one million British workers. The article shows which workplaces and which types of employee were most likely to be affected in each of these categories and suggests ways of minimizing workplace ill-treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difficulties of researching discrimination are often unacknowledged when policy makers draw on survey data. We explore these difficulties by means of a discussion informed by labour-market sociology and a subsequent empirical discussion that draws on the results of the first Fair Treatment at Work Survey (FTWS). The great majority of respondents to the FTWS appeared to trust instrumental rationality to ensure that there was no discrimination in the labour market or the workplace. Given what we know of the difficulties of establishing the existence of discrimination, this widespread belief in its absence is shown to be ideological. It is both a determinant of survey results and an obstacle to changes needed to address patterns of disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the difficulties encountered by researchers attempting to measure the prevalence of negative workplace behaviours and how these might be overcome. Drawing on the first stage of a major ESRC-funded study of workplace behaviours in Britain, we demonstrate the importance of improved sampling and data collection methods. We show how judicious use of qualitative data derived from cognitive testing of survey questions can improve substantially the reliability and validity of data. In particular, we explain how a battery of questions devised by social psychologists and used as a standard measure in surveys was tested and revised following a series of 60 in-depth interviews. These revisions ranged from fairly minor changes in wording, in order to make questions better understood, to the elimination of questions which our qualitative work persuaded us were not capturing data in the way that other researchers might have assumed they did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of nation, national identity and nationalism has long been the subject of benign neglect. After examining the few positive contributions made by classical writers, we attempt to explain why the contribution of classical theory to the field is unreliable. In common with others we find that, for all that classical theory might treat the prominence of nation, national identity and nationalism as a passing phase, it in fact takes the existence of all three as givens to such an extent that they and their effects become invisible. But the sociology of nation and nationalism reached a turning point with the publication of Elie Kedourie's influential work in 1960. We explain the effect of this work on later writers, especially Ernest Gellner and Anthony Smith, and survey the work of these and other contributors to the field with an eye to their differences and similarities. We identify various stages in the development of the sociology of nation and nationalism, culminating in the most recent stage in which the significance of the subjective aspects of nationalism has received increased attention. We think there is room for a multiplicity of approaches to the subject and stress its central significance to sociology. We explain why nation, national identity and nationalism are certainly not in decline and suggest where the most fruitful lines of inquiry lie for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the contemporary challenges facing Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, the principal nationalist political party and one of the mainstays of the nationalist movement in Wales. Welsh nationalism has been described as a trichotomous concept comprising, an ideology that maintains that a nation has an inalienable right to self government, a social movement that aims to promote solidarity amongst the Welsh people and support for national demands, and a group consciousness that extends far beyond the political horizon into the general social and cultural attitudes of the population. Plaid Cymru is one example of the uncompromising nationalism of European movements that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century in response to the ebb and flow of imperial and centralising influences. In 1997 the British Labour Party was elected on a ticket of a long-term programme of reform. It embarked on a process that sought to increase the democratic legitimacy of the state by modernising the form and functioning of government. In 1999 this included the creation of government bodies for Wales and Scotland in what had hitherto been described as a highly centralised state with few checks on the executive.

A research project undertaken for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in 1980-1 is seen as representative of a trend towards contract research and of the problems this creates for sociologists. The project entailed an examination of the 'housing needs' of the Authority's tenants in fled houses m the North of Scotland. It is suggested that the UKAEA was less interested in forecasts of housing needs than in 'expert' identification of trends with which the Authority was already familiar. The 'experts'' final report would then be used by the UKAEA to ease the progress of Authority policy in a sensitive area. The research contract did not inevitably produce a study which could be used by the UKAEA as a cosmetic but the Authority directed the research to this end. Nevertheless, the project did produce contacts and opportunities for independent research which would have been inaccessible. An example is given m the form of an account of the UKAEA's housing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the consequences of freedom of movement for social exclusion and economic development in the European Union (EU) before and after the Amsterdam Treaty. Consideration of the freedom of movement for EU citizens that is in place; Discussion of the history of migration patterns between the EU and third countries outside the Union.

This paper aims to shift the debate on the Learning Society away from the normative focus which has predominated hitherto. Rather than beginning with questions about what a Learning Society ought to constitute, we seek to engage with the patterns of participation in learning through the life‐course and their determinants. Our discussion begins with an examination of the way in which the official discourse of the Learning Society is dominated by human capital theory. The critical evaluation of the latter is thus a serious undertaking. Human capital theory involves an unwarranted abstraction of economic behaviour from social relations more widely; participation in lifetime learning cannot be understood in terms of the narrow calculation of utility maximization. This critique provides the basis for the development of a more satisfactory theoretical account, in which learning behaviour is conceived as the product of individual calculation and active choice, but within parameters set by both access to learning opportunities and collective norms. These parameters, by their very nature, vary systematically over space and time: accordingly, place and history must play a central role in any adequate theorization. We conclude that this kind of theoretical approach has important implications not only for empirical research, but also for strategies aimed at creating a Learning Society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much reliance has been placed on increased equity as a way of improving social mobility but the evidence base for this view, for example in Britain, looks less and less convincing. Part of the attraction of equity was that it was believed to promote efficiency through the refinement of meritocracy. Sociological theory now suggests that the equation of equity with efficiency may have prevented reforms which would have improved social mobility. This theory fills a gap in the human resource management (HRM) literature to show that it is far from obvious what managers should do to increase organisational efficiency when they make recruitment decisions. Instead of recruiting for efficiency, their decisions are shaped by the politics of recruitment both inside organisations, affecting management decision-making particularly, and outside organisations amongst legislators and pressure groups (for example). This politics has shaped the way equity figures in recruitment, it has, for the most part, only figured to the extent that it was believed to serve efficiency, yet what counted for efficiency was itself a political product. When it is hide-bound in this way it is small wonder that insufficient progress has been made in improving social mobility, in Britain and elsewhere, by increasing equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]