Showing papers in "The Sociological Review in 1988"

The Study of Sensitive Subjects

Abstract: This note examines some research issues raised by studies of sensitive topics and the disclosure of highly personal and confidential information. The first part focuses on the research method of in-depth interviewing and covers some theoretical and methodological problems associated with the method, together with a discussion of some strategies adopted by researchers and respondents in the interview setting. The second part discusses some of the hazards of this type of research and argues for the need to protect respondents and researchers alike. These issues are discussed with reference to the author's own fieldwork experiences of three research projects.

Towards a Typology of Female Entrepreneurs

Abstract: This paper reviews some of the employment problems faced by women and examines how these difficulties might be overcome through entrepreneurship. However, recent empirical work by Goffee and Scase suggests that it is inappropriate to speak of ‘the’ female entrepreneur: there are different types of female business proprietors. Based on an empirical study of 34 aspiring female proprietors, the authors investigate the validity of Goffee and Scase's assertions. Results suggest that there are indeed different types of female entrepreneur, and that while there are some similarities between the typology developed in this paper and that presented by Goffee and Scase, there are also significant differences between them. Possible policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Sociology and postmodernity

Abstract: Most current concepts of postmodernity refer solely to intellectual phenomena. In some cases, they focus narrowly on arts. In some others, they spill over to include a wider sp^ectnim of cultural forms and precepts. In a few cases they reach deeper, into the fundamental preconceptions of contemporary consciousness Rarely, if at all, they step beyond the boundary of the spiritual, into the changing social figuration which the artistic, cultural and cognitive developments, bracketed as postmodern, may reflect Such a self-limitation of the postmodernity discourse, and its legitimacy, is of crucial importance for the future of sociology. Indeed, if postmodernity means what the current concepts impK a reform of culture, of world-perception, of the intellectual stance then sociology faces the task of an essentially strategical adjustment. It must make itself resonant with new, postmodern culture, and break its links with the ontological and epistemologica! premises of modernity. It must transform itself into a postmodern sociology. In particular, it must follow other elements of postmodern culture by accepting (in theory as much as in practice) the self-containment and the self-grounding of the production and reproduction of meanings. It must abandon its traditional identity of a discourse characterised by an attempt to decode such meanings as products, reflections, aspects or rationalisations of social figurations and their dynamics. If, on the other hand, the self-containment of contemporary culture, and the associated implosion of vision, signal processes which reach beyond the realm of culture proper, (if they accompany transformations in. say, principles of systematic organisation or power arrangements) then it is not the traditional strategy of sociology which calls for revision, but a new focus of inquiry is needed, and a new set of categories geared to the changed social reality. In this case -

Tranquillisers as a social problem

Abstract: This paper attempts to highlight the value of the ‘social problem’ perspective for the sociology of health and illness by applying it to the issue of tranquilliser use and dependence. The approach involves focusing on the emergence of benzodiazepine tranquilliser dependence as a social problem and the extent to which it has been legitimated by the media and by the state. In the conclusion we draw out the implications of our case study for the development of a ‘natural history’ of social problems.

The relation of theory and method: causal relatedness, historical contingency and beyond

Abstract: This paper critically scrutinizes the thesis put forward by Jennifer Platt in a recent article in The Sociological Review about the general relation between theory and method, based on her investigation of the specific example of functionalism and survey research in post-war US sociology. The present paper questions the extent to which Platt's analysis and general conclusions mask important levels of connectedness between theory and method.

Language, Power and Linguistic Minorities: The Need for an Alternative Approach to Bilingualism, Language Maintenance and Shift:

Abstract: Over the last thirty years, the sociolinguistic study of bilingualism among linguistic minorities has been dominated by two different research traditions: the first began with the work of Weinreich (1953) on Languages in Contact and was subsequently developed by Ferguson (1959) and, then, Fishman (1967 and 1972) during the 19605 and early 19705. For those working within this tradition, the main concern was with accounting for the functional differentiation of languages in bilingual communities. The conceptual framework and the research procedures developed during this period still continue to be influential today. The second and more recent tradition is that associated witli the work of Gumperz (1982) and Gal (1979). Within this second tradition, the emphasis is on the social and linguistic processes operating at the micro-level of social encounters and conversational interactions. The focus is on the individual bilingual, on the emblematic use of language and on change over time. In this paper, I will present a critical evaluation of these two different approaches to the study of bilingualism among linguistic minorities. For the most part, I will be drawing on work related to the situations of regional minority languages in Europe. I will focus on the ways in which the conceptual framework developed within each of the two approaches reflects the influence of particular schools of thought in the social sciences and particular ways of thinking about social relations and social action. I will deal first with the notions of 'diglossia' (Ferguson 1959; Fishman 1967) and 'domains of language use' (Fishman 1972). I will show how these notions are derived from structuralist and functionalist views of language and society and I will outline the constraints that are inevitably imposed on the study of bilingualism by constructs developed within a structural-functional framework. In the second part of my paper, I will then turn to work by Gal

Social harmony and the small firm: a reappraisal

Abstract: Government, academics and the media have, over the past decade, entered fully into the spirit of ‘small business revival’. Many of the contributions to this debate, however, have taken for granted ...

Play the white man: the social construction of fairness and competition in equal opportunity policies

Abstract: This paper discusses the impact of equal opportunity projects on women's employment in two public sector organisations. It examines the limitations of the emerging liberal model and assesses the li...

The changing sociological construct of the family

Abstract: Recent attempts to announce the death of the family as a useful analytical category for sociologists are rebutted as being premature. The tendency to view household relations as family relations or, indeed, couple or gender relations as family relations seems to have arisen in the early 1970s. Earlier attempts to construct an empirically grounded analysis of family relationships have been curiously neglected. An account of one family on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent provides some illustrative ethnography on both the positive uses of family members-particularly siblings - and on the way the social boundaries of this family are constructed by its members. It is argued that the family is best understood as a system of relationships that change over time. There is a curious lack of systematic ethnography of contemporary family relationships so that what is taught to students as the sociology of the family may be widely at variance with their own personal experience. This may be partly a result of relying too much on random surveys of households at the expense of detailed explorations of existing patterns of social relationships and social meanings. Developing theoretical arguments on the basis of inadequate or inappropriate ethnography is evidently a dangerous and misleading exercise.

Integrating process and structure in the concept of youth: a case for secondary analysis

Abstract: During its eighty-year history, the sociology of youth has provided a succession of partial explanations of the circumstances and responses of the young. The paper critically reviews this history and defines the challenge currently faced by sociologists: to develop a conceptual framework for understanding both the transitions young people pass through as they become adult, and the differential experiences of young people from different social groups. It is argued that such a framework requires the integration of the concepts of process and structure Secondary analysis of existing large data sets is suggested as an available means of meeting the challenge, since such data sets can provide both large representative samples which allow inter-group comparisons, and wide-ranging longitudinal data which allows the study of processes

Knowing what to say: the construction of gender in linguistic practice

Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of how what people say should be taken to relate to what they mean and/or the truth about their condition. What is the status, in other words, of people's accounts, to a researcher, to their peers, or to themselves? Many fieldworkers, in anthropology, sociology, psychology, or linguistics, have to face the particular problem of how to interpret and account for apparent contradiction in what their informants tell them or say. This has been an issue of particular significance in studies of gender and class consciousness, and this paper will draw on a study of this kind, in which the researcher recorded talk about gender, class and race produced by girls from a number of different social groups (Frazer 1988). Many researchers have analysed the ways in which girls both accept the appropriateness of labellirg certain sorts of behaviour or appearance as that of a 'slag' or a 'slut' and yet resent the way it is used against girls and even recognize its function of policing their sexual and other behaviour (Lees 1986; Wilson 1978). When a girl says

The Family as Project

Abstract: Based on data gathered in settings where the family side of personal troubles is a regular concern, it is argued that the family enters into social relations as a collective representation. Adapting Durkheim's usage to everyday life, the family is analyzed as a ‘public’ project of those whose domestic affairs are challenged for consideration of family order. Three features of the family project are considered: (1) the awareness of the social form, (2) family conduct in the large, (3) family usage. As an object of experience, the family presents itself in a category separate and distinct from its members, while at the same time being a practical, discursive construct built out of, as well as reflecting concrete domestic affairs.

The Social World as Will and Idea: Schopenhauer's Influence upon Durkheim's Thought

Abstract: The starting-point for this analysis is a remark made by Andre Lalande, that Durkheim was so enamoured with Schopenhauer's philosophy that his students nicknamed him ‘Schopen’. The intellectual con...

‘Off school sick’: mothers' accounts of school sickness absence

Abstract: Interview material, collected as part of a wider ethnographic study of sickness absence in an English primary school, is used to examine how mothers accounted for their decisions to keep children ‘...

Anthropology, Language, Politics:

Abstract: In Autumn 1986 the Editorial Board of the Sociological Review invited me to edit a Monograph on some aspect of anthropology and language. Recent developments in British social anthropology and in other subjects suggested that a focus on the politics of language would make an appropriate special issue. In the last fifteen years a number of studies have appeared bearing titles which suggest a concern with this subject (e.g. Balibar and Laporte 1974; Bloch (ed.) 1975; Calvet 1974; Fowler et al. 1979; Kremerae et al. (eds) 1984; Lafont et al. 1982; O'Barr and O'Barr (eds) 1976; Paine (ed.) 1981; Parkin 1984; Pateman 1980; Smith 1984; Wolfson and Manes 1985; and many others). One striking feature of this work is its multidisciplinary (and international) character. British social anthropology is far from being the only or even the principal discipline interested in the relationship between language and the political, though it is one which has made a significant contribution to understanding that phenomenon. The articles in this volume, not all by professional anthropologists, illustrate that contribution, which stems partly from a methodological orientation towards an ethnographic perspective (see later in this paper). They also illustrate the wide range of empirical material in which a politics of language may be located. There is, however, no claim that the cases presented here in any way constitute a representative sample, or offer, as yet, a potential for systematic comparison. The intention is precisely to demonstrate the varied empirical and intellectual nature of the field, and one objective is simply to explore the several theoretical and analytical traditions which have emerged in anthropology and in other disciplines. To that extent the volume is deliberately eclectic. Nevertheless, all the papers share a common focus on the relationship between the politics of use and the politics of meaning in what can be termed 'discursive practice'.

Founding the New‘Family Studies’

Abstract: By developing the concept of Multidimensional Developmental Pathways, the potential social policy consequences of such theorising are explored. In moving towards conceptualising the actual needs of people and the unity of their lives we can consciously (rather than unconsciously) contribute proposals for rebuilding social policy. With a view to generating further interest in alternative theoretical approaches to the analysis of ‘family life’, three theorems are then proposed. These three theorems constitute the first step in founding the New ‘Family Studies’.

Creole in the classroom: political grammars and educational vocabularies

Abstract: The Caribbean Creoles spoken in the United Kingdom include French-based Creoles brought from islands such as Dominica and St Lucia but spoken by a relatively small number of British people, and the more widely spoken English-based Creoles of islands such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados. In the emigration from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom between the late 1940s and the mid 1960s Jamaica provided by far the largest numbers and has also been an increasingly important source of popular culture for many British people of Caribbean origin. This has contributed to the emergence of Jamaican Creole as the dominant Creole influence on the speech of young blacks born in Britain, regardless of parental provenance. This paper will argue that a number of approaches have been made to the issue of the place of Creole in British education and that these have themselves been shaped by a range of political 'grammars' evident in educational debates over language since the 1960s. Many of these approaches, however, have paid little regard to the actual Creole-utilizing practices of the young people who are their object. On the basis of ethnographic evidence it is clear that the issue of the relationship between Creole use and 'ethnic identity' is not simple, and that a consistent subversion of simple notions of ethnicity is evident in the language of young inner-city blacks. Rather than existing as a cultural given, ethnicity functions much more as a political resource amongst other resources and is often strategically employed in everyday anti-racist struggle. The strategic use of Creole and the simultaneous development of a 'mixed', Creole-inflected London English shared to varying degrees across racial and 'ethnic' boundaries suggests that much of the political and educational debate is now misplaced. It also makes clear the need for a deconstruction of essential notions of

Managing childcare and work responsibilities: the strategies of married women primary and infant headteachers

Abstract: The article analyses the strategies that had been developed by women teachers to enable them to meet their family obligations to care for young children and, at the same time, develop their teaching careers. Using career history data from a sample of twenty-five women headteachers, from a midlands county in England, the article considers the expectations these women had set themselves with regard to certain childcare tasks and how they had managed the resources they had, in order to meet these expectations. The interview data revealed that relationships, particularly between other women teachers, were an important resource in enabling these women to fulfil their childcare expectations while pursuing their teaching careers.

On the Altered Appetites of Pregnancy: Conceptions of Food, Body and Person

Abstract: Ethnographic interview data recording the experience of alterations in appetite in pregnancy, notably aversions to and cravings for food are reported. These data are interpreted in the light of symbolic interactionist insights into the process of self-indication, the process whereby people's sense of self and identity entails the attribution of meaning to the world in which they find themselves, a world that includes their own bodily self. Aversions appear unequivocally identifiable, but doubts arise about cravings – doubts that are conceptualised with reference to a sense of body, of self and conception of moral worth.

‘We Condemn Apartheid, but …’: A Discursive Analysis of the European Parliamentary Debate on Sanctions (July 1986):

Abstract: In Western Europe sanctions are debated in a number of contexts, formal and informal, using a variety of modes: spoken, written, iconic, kinesic, musical; and, in popular culture, through a combination of these modes. In terms of formal talk, debates take place in parliament and are relayed by the media. At the same time, the issue of sanctions is fought over in the extraparliamentary arena: in local and national campaigns and boycotts which receive scant media attention, in international bodies, as well as in trade and financial circles. The sum total of these discussions, confrontations and campaigns may be seen to constitute 'the sanctions debate' or 'sanctions discourse' in a broad sense. The different ways in which sanctions are 'seen' and articulated by the proand anti-sanctions lobbies, that is, the meanings and images which are put into circulation and fought over contribute to the destruction or maintenance of apartheid respectively, and, at a more general level, to the antiracist and racist discourses at large.

Whose ‘family’? A note on ‘The changing sociological construct of the family’

Abstract: It is encouraging to read ethnographic research that addresses the way actors understand their own ‘family lives' which also includes some debate about the way sociologists use the term ‘the family’.

Durkheim and Individualism

Abstract: Durkheim endorses moral and rejects methodological individualism. But he arrives at this ‘general position’ via a particular development of it that runs into serious sociological, apart from any ph...

‘Janus-faced signs' — the political language of a Soviet minority before Glasnost’

Abstract: It is not easy to discover the political attitudes of minority peoples of the USSR in the pre-glasnost' period. Any such idea as we must approach it, as it appears in speech or writing, cannot be fully understood on its own, since it exists in a context consisting of the domain of possible concepts. 'Possible concepts' include memories, ideas expressed in dialects or the vocabulary of special groups, latent and about-to-be-formulated notions, and ideas which cannot be stated in given political circumstances. It is from the domain of possible concepts and the evaluation attached to them that we can perceive the resonance of the political vocabulary which is actually used. The paper discusses the emergence of new political ideas among the Buryat and their fate in the twentieth century a story which is necessarily incomplete, not only because of the distance of the subject from ourselves! but also because all that is available to us for study, language as actually employed, is necessarily ambiguous and open to interpretation. A proposal to study ideas by means of analysis of the political vocabulary entails some obvious methodological problems. The first is the lack of any generally accepted theory, in either linguistics or philosophy, of the relation between words and consciousness. It would clearly be mistaken, as Skinner has pointed out (1980: 562-78), simply to equate the word and the concept, since it cannot be a n\\~cessary condition of someone thinking along certain lines that s/he already possess a corresponding and accepted linguistic term. Furthermore, in the case of certain highly general terms, such as being or infinity, used with perfect consistency by an entire community, it might be possible to show that there are no concepts which answer to their agreed usages. However, Skinner concluded that, while there can be no single formula for the relationship between concepts and words, we can assume for practical purposes that 'the possession of a

The politics of naming among the Giriama

Abstract: First man: Who are you? Traveller: I am Karisa son of Muramba son of Mweni. First man: Ah! So you are of the MwaMweni clan. Then we are brothers-in-law, for my sister was married by a MwaMweni. Where do you come from? Traveller: I come from Kaloleni, near Madebe's place. Second man: My grandchild, the daughter of my son, was married to a man they call Musela. Traveller: Yes, I know him. He is BiCharo, ... that is Kahindi Ngumbao.

Weber, Simmel, and the sociology of culture

Abstract: Max Weber and Georg Simmel began their long and important association not later than the mid-1890s. Both emerged from the upper middle class intellectual life of Berlin, but with different starting points: Protestant political and moralistic culture for Weber; the Jewish experience and the new aesthetic culture of modernism for Simmel. Despite such a contrast, Weber and Simmel were drawn together essentially because of a shared interest in problems of modern culture. The historical evidence shows that this interest developed around an assessment of Nietzsche's significance and a critique of ‘psychologism’. The German Sociological Society both helped to establish in 1909 then became a notable, if brief, episode in the attempt to clarify the tasks of sociology as a ‘science of culture’. Their relationship (and Marianne Weber's) to the debate over the prospects for a unique ‘female culture’ illustrates a neglected aspect of the cultural problem. Notwithstanding their different sociologies, Weber and Simmel c...

Imputing Beliefs: A Controversy in the Sociology of Knowledge:

Abstract: The problem of imputation – how to ascribe ideas and beliefs to groups, or to individuals on the basis of their group membership – has occasionally occupied the attention of those working in the so...

Rhetoric, division and constraint: elements in local social mobilisation

Abstract: The paper is a speculative discussion of the relative saliency of communal rhetoric in instances of local social mobilisation. Despite several recent studies of local collective action, there remains considerable uncertainty as to when – and why – values exphasising local distinctiveness and superiority find assertion amongst groups at the community level.By detailing the activities of residents associations and organised amenity groups in one setting, I suggest that the saliency of communal imagery is closely associated with constraints facing local leaders in mobilising and sustaining their support. Where leadership interests are well established, yet must base their legitimacy in appeal to pluralistic sources of local support, the celebration of communal identity is pronounced and pervades local collective action. The declaration of communal unity then, marks the existence of elites for whom such sentiments are advantageous.This point suggests a re-examination of Coleman's earlier analysis of community...

‘Racial’ referents: images of European/Aboriginal relations in Australian feature films, 1955–1984

Abstract: The article discusses fifteen feature films which re-present aspects of European/Aboriginal relations. Through an analysis of the narrative structures of the films, three basic themes are identified and outlined, each of which could be implicated in the processes through which racist ideology inheres in the encoding/decoding nexus. The concept of ‘racial’ register is utilised to signify the limits to these forms of representations. It is argued that at both the levels of the narrative theme (intertextual) and the syntagmatic (intratextual), the ‘racial’ register works to reconstruct ‘race’ as an overdetermined ideological notion which cements ideas of essential difference and fixes them to ideas of place. The article concludes with an examination of three films which lie partially outside the ‘racial’ register.

A comment on: The relation of theory and method: causal relatedness, historical contingency and beyond

Abstract: My central disagreement is with Layder’s statement (p. 459) that ‘the distinction between method and methodology is basically false in the sense that specific methods are always saturated with methodological prescriptions and thus, theoretical assumptions’. On the contrary, there are good grounds for arguing that there is no necessary connection between the use of a particular method and a particular general methodological standpoint. Consider, for example, the use of ‘pure’ observation in empirical inquiry by Lyn Lofland in her study of behaviour in public places (1973), by MassObservation in their pioneering studies in the 1930s, and by Nobel Laureate Nico Tinbergen in his studies of birds in their natural habitats. In certain respects the methods of inquiry used closely resemble one another, yet the epistemological and general methodological assumptions underlying each of the three sets of work are quite different. Or consider debates among historians and historical sociologists over the standard of living in England during the Industrial Revolution. The protagonists such as Eric Hobsbawm and R.M. Hartwell employed quite different interpretative frameworks but relied upon similar kinds of simple statistical methods to examine changes in price levels and the purchasing power of wages over time. When specific methodsor, as in Jennifer Platt’s article, specific periods in the history of sociology are closely examined, the degree of ‘saturation’ which Layder postulates is frequently lacking. Alan Bryman (1984, 1988) for example, has convincingly suggested that there is a much less close fit between the practice of either quantitative or qualitative research and the supposed epistemological assumptions which underlie them than is often thought. Nicholas Bateson (1984) has shown for survey research how survey data are not ‘given’ by the procedures that are used but