Showing papers in "British Journal of Sociology in 1989"

The End of Organized Capitalism

Abstract: \"The End of Organized Capitalism\" argues that despite Marx s and Weber s insistence that capitalist societies become increasingly more ordered we now live in an era of disorganized capitalism. The book is devoted to a systematic examination of the shift to disorganized capitalism in five Western nations (Britain, the United States, France, West Germany, and Sweden). Through the analysis of space, class, and culture, Lash and Urry portray the restructuring of capitalist social relations that has resulted from this disorganization. They adduce evidence for the claims that in each of the nations there is a movement toward a deconcentration of capital within nation-states; toward the increased separation of banks, industry and the state; and toward the redistribution of productive relations and class-relevant residential patterns. The authors also show that national disparities in contemporary, disorganized capitalism can be understood through close examination of the extent to which, and mode in which, capitalism became historically organized in each of the five countries under consideration. The lucid arguments and judicious comparisons in this book will be of great interest to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and historians. \

Health and Deprivation: Inequality and the North

Abstract: Using new evidence drawn from studies of communities in the north of England, this work highlights material deprivation as the crucial factor in explaining inequalities in health.

Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography

Abstract: Grade Level: 9-12 (and beyond) Learning Standards: WA State EALR 4 Music — The student makes connections within and across the arts (dance, music, theatre and visual arts), to other disciplines, life, cultures and work. 4.4) Understands how the arts influence and reflect cultures/civilizations, place and time Learning Objectives: (1) Understand and implement ethnographic research methods applied to a musical genre, (2) Determine and interpret specific attributes of music that shape culture and/or history, (3) Select and compare specific musical works that have shaped culture/history.

Justice unbalanced : gender, psychiatry, and judicial decisions

Abstract: The discrepancy and its analysis responsibility and the verdict no offence intended doctoring the sentence playing the labels treatment versus punishment.

Truth and goodness, mirrors and masks Part II: a sociology of beauty and the face

Abstract: What is the face? The face, as unique, physical, malleable and public is the prime symbol of the self. It is unique, for no two faces are identical, and it is in the face that we recognize each other, and identify ourselves. Our faces are pictured in our passports and identification papers. The face is physical, and therefore personal and intimate, yet the face is also 'made up', 'put on' and subject to fashion. It is public, but also intensely private and intimate. And, malleable, with its eighty mimetic muscles, the face is capable of over 7,000 expressions. Furthermore, the face indicates the age, gender and race of the self with varying degrees of accuracy, also our health and socio-economic status, our moods and emotions, even perhaps our character and personality. The face is also the site of four of our five senses: sight, taste, smell and hearing, and the site for our intakes of food, drink and air. It is also the source of verbal communication, and an important source for non-verbal communication. Gloria Swanson once said: 'We didn't need dialogue. We had faces.' Moreover the face is also the principal determinant in the perception of our individual beauty or ugliness, and all that these perceptions imply for self-esteem and life-chances. The face indeed symbolizes the self, and signifies many different facets of the self. More than any other part of the body, we identify the face as me oryou. Nothing indicates the significance of the face more than the failure to recognize faces and facial expressions. Dr Sacks has described one such person, a victim of Korsakov's syndrome who, during the medical examination, apparently mistook his wife for a hat, and tried to, literally, pick her up to put on his head; not surprisingly, he could not recognize facial expressions either. Yet another patient, horrifyingly, could not recognize his own face in a mirror (1987: 11-13, 21). The face, however, and indeed beauty and the physical body also, have been largely ignored by mainstream sociology, at least until relatively recently. Only Simmel ( 1901/ 1965) and Veblen ( 1899/

Ageing, status politics and sociological theory.

Abstract: As a feature of social change and as an aspect of social stratification, ageing and age groups have been seriously neglected by sociological theory. This article attempts to conceptualize age groups in a multi-dimensional model of stratification which considers ageing in relation to economic class, political entitlement, or citizenship, and cultural life-styles. This multi-dimensional model provides an analytical basis for rejecting functionalist theories of ageing, which emphasize the positive functions of social disengagement, activity theories, which show that self-esteem in ageing is an effect of continuing social involvement, and Marxist social gerontology, which argues that retirement is determined by labour-market requirements in capitalism. The article concludes by developing a reciprocity-maturation curve of ageing which explains age stigmatization through exchange theory as an effect of declining social reciprocity. Both young and elderly social groups in a period of economic recession are perceived to be socially dependent, and become the targets of 'the politics of resentment'. The processes of social ageing can be located in the core of sociological theory, because they are connected fundamentally to the conditions of social solidarity.

Testing Hargreaves' and Lacey's differentiation-polarisation theory in a setted comprehensive

Abstract: This article explores the extent to which Hargeaves' and Lacey's differentiation-polarisation theory is applicable to setted comprehensive schools bearing in mind certain objections to the theory made by Quine. The research is based on an ethnographic study of a comprehensive school, located in the south of England, in which the pupils are streamed by sets after the first year. The sample of pupils studied are fourth years in the top, middle and bottom streams of the school. By using a variety of research methods to study the historical and current academic and behavioural values of the pupils, this paper suggests that the differentiation-polarisation theory holds fairly well, particularly in the second year. The research does not substantiate Quine's objections to the theory. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the theory for social class differentiation and other contemporary theories in the sociology of education.

Researching Police Deviance: A Personal Encounter with the Limitations and Liabilities of Field-Work

Abstract: Accounts of field-work occasionally reveal the stress, the deep personal involvement, the role-conflicts, and the time-consuming nature of observational studies for the researcher (e.g. Whyte, Wax, Hofland, Johnsonl). Clarke' has written of the anguish of certain anthropologists, causing some even to abandon the field setting; while Van Maanens has contrasted the rich oral tradition among academics, centred on what ostensibly 'really' happened in the field, with the self-censored material in publications on their research experience. That experience may appear incoherent, blurred, or stressful at the time and researchers may have considerable difficulty portraying the story behind the story of their field-work (perhaps because it is embarrassing or else it is considered unsuitable for a 'serious' publication). Reading Van Maanen's insightful work stimulate* me to take out an article I had written several years ago, but which I had been unable to publish fully at the time, and to rework it in an attempt to convey in depth both the constraints encountered in the field and my reflections on the research experience long after departure. My initial account was somewhat gloomy and reeked of weary disillusionment. Now I can take a more dispassionate look at the research I conducted with the Amsterdam Police in the period 197X1980. My purpose in this paper is to focus on three elements of that fieldwork. First, I wish to convey the strain I experienced in a demanding field setting; second, I want to communicate my acute awareness of the limitations of research in penetrating sensitive areas of institutional life; and, third, I hope to illuminate some of the ethical dilemmas encountered in the field (which one may only fully be conscious of in retrospect). And perhaps I should add that, however rough the passage, the experienced field-worker has almost a moral obligation not to discourage others but rather to incite them to get out into the field. For there is something irreducible in the mundane dilemmas of even the most unproblematic field situations that forces academics to

The homosexual escort agency: deviance disavowal.

Abstract: This article examines the management of deviance disavowal techniques by a commercial organization. Ball's abortion clinic ethnography (1972:158-86) paved the way for an analysis of the neutralization of disreputable encounters. This study, based on research conducted in London, England during 1981, attempts to explore how stigmatizing sexual liaisons are routinely managed by an escort agency. The article is based on interviews conducted with one homosexual escort agency owner and twenty-eight male escorts and discusses the neutralization of moral approbrium through the organization of names, space and structure.

The metropolis era.

Abstract: This two-volume work is the product of a conference on the worlds large cities held in Barcelona Spain February 25-March 1 1985. The main objective of the conference was to examine how huge urban conglomerates and metropolitan areas can confront and resolve the malfunctions that stem from their growth. The two volumes contain 28 studies by various authors from an interdisciplinary background. The first volume subtitled A World of Giant Cities contains 13 chapters that are mainly comparative in concept and that describe the major urban areas of the world. The second volume subtitled Mega-Cities presents case studies of four cities in developed countries and six in developing countries. The contributors define a new kind of city "the region-dominating city. They analyze worldwide metropolitan trends and projections and explore topics such as urban hierarchy and economic restructuring." (EXCERPT)

Women's studies in British sociology: to end at our beginning?

Abstract: 'Men are rarely conscious of the quality of the air they breathe', wrote R. H. Tawney in 1931 with the firmly unconscious sexism that characterizes his writings, and many of those in this period in which British sociology was attempting to form its own distinctive tradition. Tawney's Equality, suitably dedicated to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, was concerned with differences in rank and status and power and property in the real world, and not as obtaining within what counts as 'knowledge' of the facts, interpretation and understanding of that world. None the less, Tawney's identification of the obstacle to progress as being chiefly 'the habit of mind which thinks it ... natural and desirable that different sections of a community should be distinguished from each other' would do as well today as an explanation of the impact of feminism on academic

Theory and Method in Recent British Sociology: Whither the Empirical Impulse?

Abstract: discussion of problems of concept formation is sterile; what social theorists should be doing is constructing substantive theories whose conceptual merits will come out in the wash of intertheoretical discussion... (T)his view, however tempting it may seem in the present state of sociological theorising, rests on a misunderstanding of the conceptual problems of the social sciences. ( 1983: 155) In the course of Outhwaite's discussion, empirical sociology is caricatured. The warrant for rejecting the view that theory and research can assist each other is that most empirical inquiry is supposed to be characterised by 'positivism', whose credibility is then supposedly demolished with reference to the Vienna School of logical positivists. Most contemporary empirical sociologists in Britain would, one imagines, be surprised to have their work assimilated to that of the rarely-read Otto Neurath. This example is quoted because it is characteristic of a trend in contemporary sociology, toward the absolute separation of'theory' from empirical inquiry, with little understanding of the procedures of empirical research or of the gains which can follow from using research to illuminate theoretical ideas. Classical social theory and its exegetists may indeed be trapped by self-imposed boundaries. As Edward Shils has observed, the unity which sociology possesses over and above specialisation rests upon a common devotion to a relatively small number of'key words'. That unity is very expensively purchased. The key words and the ideas they evoke have become inexpungably enmeshed in the sociological tradition, so much so that they can never be merely an honorific decoration. They have become constitutive of sociological analysis. But the fact remains that they weigh like an Alp on the sociological mind. Theory is recognised as such by the presence of those alpine key words in all their misty and simple grandeur. This is not good enough. Sociology needs a much more differentiated set of categories, a much more differentiated set of names for distinguishable things. It must name many more things and name them in agreed and recognisable ways. The 'slippage' between 'concepts' and 'indicators' must be reduced by increasing and refining the variety of 'concepts'. (Shils 1970:819) A recent (and unusual) collection by llobert Burgess on Key Variables in Social Investigation ( 1986) brings out very well the theoryThis content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 06:44:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Theory anzl methozl in recent British sociology 399 embeddedness of sociological inquiry. Sociological concepts are embedded in theory, part of a theoretical web which represents a more abstract attempt to come to terms with the phenomenon being studied. This means that there is an interplay between concepts, theory and data in the course of empirical inquiry. The Kantian adage that perception without conception is blind, conception without perception is empty, is very much to the poi;at, though it is not a precept that is treated with any great seriousness in much of what currently passes for general sociological theory in Britain. EmX7irical research A different approach to integration, found in disciplines like history and geography, may lie not in theoretical unification but in a common approach to the assessment of empirical data. These fish are steered by the tail rather than the head, as well as being constrained by temporal or spatial boundaries. Historians study very diverse periods and topics, but share some common standards for the assessment of historical evidence. Such common standards, which would provide an alternative way forward, are generally lacking in contemporary British sociology. There is considerable ambivalence about the extent to which rigorous empirical testing of theoretical ideas is necessary, and some resistance to the acquisition of methodological skills which could be used in such testing. To some extent this may be a product of the way in which sociology is taught. llesearch methods tend to be ghettoised in separate courses at undergraduate and masters level, and do not receive the strong reinforcement in substantive courses to the extent that they do in disciplines like psychology or economics. This reinforces already quite strongly entrenched conceptions that being a sociologist does not require a high level of methodological competence. The tradition of empirical social investigation, which is a great strength of British sociology, has a long lineage which is largely though not completely separate from the more theoretical strain. Its origins lie in 'blue-book sociology' and inquiries into public health conditions in the nineteenth century. It was then given a great impetus by the investigations into poverty of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. The survey tradition carried this impulse through the inter-war period and into the post-war world, spawning studies of a whole range of social conditions. The inter-war surveys of social deprivation made a marked impact, bringing awareness of empirical inquiry to a wider public audience. Lancelot Hogben's work on political arithmetic at LSE in the 1930s also fed into this tradition of inquiry. Indeed, in the immediate post-war period some influential figures such as Mark Abrams and David Glass identified social science with social reform. Abrams's Social Surveys and Social Action ( 1951 ) and This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 06:44:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms