Showing papers in "British Journal of Sociology in 1985"

The Chinese Family Firm: A Model

Abstract: Three aspects of Chinese economic familism are distinguished: nepotism, paternalism, and family ownership. This essay is mainly concerned with the last aspect and the resultant phenomenon of the prevalence of family firms among privately owned Chinese commercial and industrial enterprises. It is argued that such firms are not necessarily small, impermanent, and conservative, because they tend to behave differently at various stages of their developmental cycle. Four phases of development—emergent, centralized, segmented, and disintegrative—are identified and discussed. This Chinese pattern is then compared with its Filipino and Japanese counterparts.

Power and Resistance

Abstract: Treatments of Weber's discussion of power have not adequately appreciated that in his analysis power and resistance are distinct but interdependent aspects of power relations. The concept 'resistance' is necessary for an understanding of power relations and irreducible to the concept of'power'. However this insight cannot be developed from Weberian premises. Through a discussion of accounts of power in Lukes, Giddens, and others, it is shown that the distinction between power and resistance remains obscure for theories which emphasize the formal properties of power and ignore its social context. The exercise of power over others draws upon social resources not available to subordinate agents. Nevertheless, those subject to power can mobilize other social resources in a contribution to power relations through resistance. In limiting power, resistance influences the outcome of power relations. Power relations imply acceptance on the part of those subject to them. They also imply resistance. This has been regarded as paradoxical, if not contradictory. But acceptance by social actors of the legitimacy of power over them does not imply that they cannot attempt to moderate its effects. That is, an acceptance of power does not preclude resistance. Pragmatic or expedient acceptance of power includes a significant resistive element, either because of an absence of interest in the realization of the goals of power, or because of an overt hindrance of its proper operations. The distinction implicit here between 'frictional' and 'intentional' resistance raises another matter, namely the idea that resistance to power leads to conflict. Resistance can take different forms, but none are necessarily associated with conflict. What they have in common, rather, is the fact that resistance imposes limits on power. Indeed, it is through its limitation on power that resistance contributes to the outcome of power relations. 7he British Journal of Sociology Volume XX,YVI Number 4 J. M. Barbalet This content downloaded from 207.46.13.158 on Wed, 16 Nov 2016 04:27:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Philosophical-Political Profiles

Abstract: Based on the new German edition of Philosophisch-politische Profile which has attracted serious and widespread attention, this book includes thirteen pieces written by Habermas between 1958 and 1978 - the most important of those in the German edition, plus additional articles.In these essays, Habermas offers a clear and strikingly personal examination of major modern German philosophers and cultural critics, focusing particularly on the content of their thought in relation to their respective political and biographical contexts.Contents: Does Philosophy Still Have a Purpose?; The German Influence (Heidegger); The Figures of Truth (Jaspers); Karl Lowith's Stoic Retreat from Historical Consciousness; A Marxist Schelling (Bloch); A Primal History of Subjectivity and Self-Affirmation Gone Wild (Adorno); Imitated Substantiality (Gehlen); Consciousness-raising or Rescuing Critique-On the Relevance of Walter Benjamin; Herbert Marcuse on Art and Revolution; Hannah Arendt's Concept of Power; The Hidden Torah (Gershom Scholem); Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province-In Praise of Hans-Georg Gadamer.Philosophical-Political Profiles is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.

On Economic Development and Social Mobility

Abstract: The proposition that social mobility increases with economic development has been widely accepted. However, it is one that can be construed in a number of quite different ways, which call for different kinds of empirical test. The comparative mobility data used in most tests thus far made have been seriously defective. More recent research, based on data of greater reliability, suggests that the proposition in all its versions should be viewed with some

Deskilling or enskilling : an empirical investigation of recent theories of the labour process.

Abstract: This article involves an investigation of the effects of technological changes since 1970 upon the division of labour in three British paper mills. The data was collected in the Spring and Summer of 1984 and is used to develop a model of technical change and the division of labour that moves well beyond conventional positions in the field. In particular, Braverman's theory of deskilling is challenged empirically and theoretically. A new theory the compensatory theory of skill is set out in the early stages of the article and a modified version of this approach is accepted in the conclusions. The most important finding involves the rapid increase in maintenance skills in the three plants examined. Other significant findings centre on the need for production workers to interpret computer controlled dials or meters and then to respond using their traditional detailed understandings of the processes of paper manufacture. This paper is concerned with the impact of technical change upon unskilled work in the paper and board industry. It is part of a wider project examining the impact of automation in the British manufacturing industry upon the division of labour and particularly upon the jobs of skilled manual workers. l The British paper and board industry has been subject to intense competition since the early 1970s, particularly from Sweden, Finland and the E.E.C. Employment in the industry fell from 63,000 in 1970 to 37,000 in 1982 whilst imports rose from 2,505,600 tonnes to 3,954,600 tonnes over the same period. Traditionally, Britain has lagged behind foreign competitors in terms of the generation of new plants. In 1982 54 per cent of British capacity in the paper and board industry had been installed before 1950 and only 6 per cent since 1971, compared with equivalent figures in Sweden of 20 per cent (pre-1950) and 31 per cent (since 1971) and in Finland of 23 per cent (pre-1950) and 24 per cent (since 1971).2 The British Journal of Sociology Volume X,S Vl Number 4 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:00:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 612 Roger Penn and Ililda Scattergood Nevertheless, our research shows that in the firms which we have examined there has been a considerable amount of automation since 1971 and that technical change has accelerated since 1979 and the onset of the present economic depression. The three firms examined are all located in the north-west region of England an area which has been a traditional centre for paper making in the twentieth century. We will use these case studies to probe the various models of skilled work and technical change within the current sociological literature. I MODELS OF SKII,LED WORK AND TECHNICAL CHANGE Four models of skilled work and technical change can be identified in the sociological literature. We present them chronologically since the later models can be seen as improvements upon earlier conceptualizations as a result of empirical work in the area of changes in the division of labour. The first model is what has been called the 'skilling' thesis. Its central argument is that advanced industrial societies require increasingly skilled workforces. Great importance is attached by writers like Bell (1973) and Touraine (1969) to the emergence of electronics as a new force in production. Perhaps the strongest argument concerning the importance of electronics for future developments in the division of labour was put forward by Fuchs (1968) in his seminal work, The Service Economy. Fuchs argued that the evolution of new advanced technologies (particularly computers) requires an increasingly educated labour force for their cuccessful development. Fuchs's work was part of a general current of ideas in the US during the 1960s which emphasized the need for increased investment in manpower training or the production of 'human' capital. Indeed, it is the belief amongst human capital theorists that investment will increasingly take such a form that provides the basis for their view that sophisticated technology will engender a secular 'skilling' of the workforce in advanced industrial . .

Culture And Agency: The Myth of Cultural Integration

Abstract: The conceptualization of culture is extraordinary in two respects. It has displayed the weakest analytical development of any key concept in sociology and it has played the most wildly vacillating role within sociological theory. At the descriptive level, the notion of ‘culture’ remains inordinately vague despite little dispute that it is indeed a core concept In every way ‘culture’ is the poor relation of ‘structure’. Definition of the former has not undergone an elaboration equivalent to that of the latter. Consequently there is no ready fund of analytical terms for designating the components of the cultural realm corresponding to those which delineate parts of the structural domain (roles, organizations, institutions, systems, etc). Methodologically, such is the poverty of conceptualization that there are as yet no ‘units’ for describing culture: essentially cultures are still ‘grasped’, in contrast to structures which are now ‘analysed’. Basically the notion of cultures being structured is uncommonly rare outside of structuralism: instead of different ‘cultural structures’ there are endless ‘cultural differences’. At the explanatory level the status of culture oscillates between that of a supremely independent variable, the superordinate power in society and, with a large sweep of the pendulum, a position of supine dependence on other social institutions. Hence, in various sociological theories, culture swings from being the prime mover (credited with engulfing and orchestrating the entire social structure) to the opposite extreme where it is reduced to a mere epiphenomenon (charged only with providing an ideational representation of structure). Together, this descriptive vagueness and these theoretical vagaries, mean that culture occupies no clear place in sociological analysis.

Class and Party in Australia: Comparison with Britain and the USA

Abstract: One of the most familiar theories about politics in Australia, as in Britain, is that the political parties are divided fundamentally on class lines. But the strength and nature of the link between class and party remains both controversial and unclear. This paper brings new evidence to bear by applying powerful multivariate techniques to national sample survey data from Australia, Britain and the USA. We distinguish three separate aspects of class: the categorical distinction between blueand white-collar workers which informs the standard definition of class in political science; an occupational status aspect which ranks jobs on a continuum running from low to high; and confict aspects, based on 'ownership of the means of production', on the 'exercise of authority in the workplace', and the cleavage between public and private employees. We show, first, that these quite distinct aspects of class have different effects. In Australia occupational status has important effects on income and class self-image but is politically irrelevant. The much maligned blue-collar/white-collar distinction is, indeed, financially irrelevant but, none the less, has appreciable effects on class self-image and political preferences, while the conflict aspects have modest but clear effects on income, class self-image and politics. Whether or not an individual is a public employee is consistently important in all three countries. Second, the impact of class on party is relatively modest, albeit cler. Finally, these patterns are quite similar in Australia, Britain and the USA.

Morality in the Evolution of the Modern Social System

Abstract: The early sociologists, at least until the First World War, and perhaps even until the Second, confidently assumed that the course of social evolutlon had an analogue in the process of biological evolution. Such an idea, already anticipated by Auguste Comte, is central to the work of Herbert Spencer and can be easily identified in the optimistic early Durkheim, but it had perhaps its fullest expression, and acquired its special application to moral evolution, in the work of the early English sociologists. Almost simultaneously, L. T. Hobhouse produced his two volume work Morals in Evolution, and his eventual successor as Martin White Professor, Edward Westermarck, published his two volumes on The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. Today, those works stand as neglected monuments of a past age of sociological thought; but I seek neither to compare them nor to speculate on the sort of intellectual debate that might have occurred when two dominant figures each set to work on a common theme. Rather, I seek only to add a tentative footnote, albeit a somewhat lengthy one, to the task which, in Morals in Evolution, Hobhouse set himself. That task, Morris Ginsberg later told us, was 'to trace the growth of morals' and, if my assumptions differ somewhat from those of Hobhouse and, if I find myself unenthused by the optimism that permeates his pages I speak, none the less, in honour of that pioneer sociologist whose memory and whose work we are here today to commemorate. Hobhouse assumed that one might properly speak of 'moral progress'. He wrote,

Unions and Politics in Mexico: The Case of the Automobile Industry

Abstract: List of tables List of figures Acknowledgements Preface List of abbreviations Map: location of automobile plants 1. Organised labour in Mexico 2. The Mexican automobile industry 3. Wages and workers in the Mexican automobile industry 4. The unions: a historical analysis 5. The unions: power and organisation 6. Control over work processes 7. Union government 8. The labour courts 9. The empirical findings and the dynamics of industrial militancy 10. Unions and political stability in Mexico Notes Bibliography Index.

The Origins of Trade Union Power

Abstract: In this book Henry Phelps Brown traces the historical process by which trade unions have achieved their present position in the community.

Liturgy, Ambiguity and Silence: The Ritual Management of Real Absence

Abstract: 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.