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This article introduces a collection of papers comprising the special issue, "Competing interests: Parents, Schools and Nation States." Drawing on the seven papers in the collection, and situating them in recent developments in the sociological field, the article discusses globally shifting relations between families, schools and the state across a range of nations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Australia, Germany, India, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA). The article proposes that the school is a crucial site for relations between family and state, and argues that a significant focus of the material and occupational investment of contemporary parents is the formal education of their children, re-shaping not only the relationship between parents and schools but also the nature of parenthood itself. In the contemporary context of global neoliberal education reform, parents are analysed both as local actors in schools and as subjects of national and international policy regimes.

Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of images of far right symbols and commercial products in Germany, combined with 62 interviews conducted with German youth and their teachers in 2013–2014, this article examines young Germans’ sense of style and their interpretation of far right-wing symbols and codes in commercial products, clothing, and tattoos. The article focuses on the role that perceptions of masculinity and body image play in the appeal of clothing brands and styles popular with the far right. The analytical focus is on two iconographical tropes – the soldier/sailor and the rebel/rule-breaker – as devices that help articulate how a hegemonic far right version of masculinity is inscribed through male bodies. The article thus identifies subcultural style as a key mechanism through which masculinity and nationalism are linked and mutually reinforced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bodemann addresses the problem of how classical German sociology in the early twentieth century dealt with the question of the Other, as well as with the questions of ethno-national solidarities and race. In contemporary debates the Jews constituted a central trope. Bodemann focuses in particular on Werner Sombart, one of the three central figures in sociology at the time, but he also looks at the early meetings of the German Sociological Society and writings by Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Ferdinand Tonnies. Despite the fact that, even in 1910, Germany was a multi-ethnic state replete with discussions of race and the role of the Jews in society—and in sharp contrast to early American sociology—German sociology (with the principal and important exception of Sombart, and some minor reflections by Weber, Simmel and Tonnies) took little interest in the social positioning of Jews and the disputes on antisemitism, and even the classics were concerned with these issues mostly in relation to contemporary race theories. This lack of interest, Bodemann argues, left sociology theoretically unprepared for the nationalist frenzy that was about to be unleashed with the outbreak of the First World War, or for the intensifying antisemitism and the rise of fascism that followed it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post-war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio-political discourses as well as in long-term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio-political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio-political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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