Showing papers in "The Sociological Review in 1996"

‘It's Good to Talk’: The Focus Group and the Sociological Imagination:

Abstract: This paper argues that the critical social scientist can employ the focus group – group discussions focused by a facilitator around a particular topic or area of experience – to recast radically both the social relations and the object of the research process. I explore the potential of the focus group to cultivate the sociological imagination in both the facilitating social scientist and the participants: in Bhaskarian terms, a ‘transformtional act', raising consciousness and empowering participants, rupturing rather than reproducing underlying relations of exploitation and domination. The hitherto dominant forms of focus group research are criticised as being embedded in the epistemological and methodological assumptions of positivism, behaviourism and empiricism, and in social relations which service power. The qualities of the focus group which have attracted the marketer and advertiser – access to the experiential knowledge, opinions and world-view of the participants, in a context of synergic interaction – are examined. The paper argues for an alternative, radical use of focus groups, based on the new politics of knowledge associated with movements of social resistance. The relationship between this radical conception of focus groups and both Habermas's theory of communicative action and Bhaskar's critical realism is discussed and examples of the potential for focus groups to democratise governance and service provision are offered.

Rethinking Childhood Dependency: Children's Contributions to the Domestic Economy:

Abstract: In industrialised countries, the growth of wage labour and capitalist relations of production have been associated with a decline in ‘child labour’. The general assumption within sociology is that children do not undertake productive labour, and that their new economic role is to attend school and prepare to become future members of the labour force. This paper presents evidence from a wider research project on children's involvement in ‘work’ and focuses on children's accounts of their contribution to domestic labour within their homes, based on an analysis of children's written descriptions of their everyday lives outside school. Data were collected from 730 children aged between 11 and 16 years in schools in Birmingham and Cambridgeshire, and in a small number of interviews and discussions with children. The paper suggests that children's labour has been rendered invisible behind dominant conceptualisations within sociology of ‘the child’ as passive and dependent, and argues that far from being mere ‘burdens' on their families, some children may be making important contributions to household labour in the form of the routine daily tasks and child-care they undertake.

‘What about the boys?’: schooling, class and crisis masculinity

Abstract: Currently there is growing professional concern in education about ‘boys’ schooling underachievement'. At the same time, popular representations are emerging in the media that position boys as the new victims of institutional gender discrimination. Implicit in these accounts is the notion of fixed gender categories for girls and boys that are in the process of changing. In contrast, recent feminist research on schooling has shown the limits of earlier sex role models of socialisation, that operated with fixed gender images of male and female pupils. It is suggested in this paper that there is a need to draw upon this literature, in order to develop a more sophisticated framework of male identity formation at a school level. The emerging thesis of ‘boys’ underachievement' needs to be located within this framework, that suggests that schools make available a range of femininities and masculinities that young people come to occupy. This paper focuses upon an exploration of the cultural production of white wo...

Working on the front‐line: risk culture and nursing in the new NHS

Abstract: Nursing and midwifery are increasingly marked by risk and uncertainty under the dual impact of patient consumerism and organisational accountability. The omnipresent character of risk in health work means that it is particularly difficult to manage. Since the practice decisions of today may only be known as problems in the future, risk can never really be forestalled. This means that it is very difficult to close-off risk, but nonetheless imperative to try. Drawing on research conducted in two hospital trusts, this paper explores the strategies that nurses and midwives use in an attempt to colonise the future and protect themselves in the risk culture of the new NHS. It will suggest that although the self-protective strategies that emerge may enhance quality of patient care, they can also generate defensive practices which are in the interests of neither nurses and midwives nor patients.

Goodbye to sex and gender

Abstract: The sociological distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ has been paradigmatic for twenty years and is still taken for granted within the discipline. However it is a distinction that will no longer serve. Doubts about its continued usefulness surfaced as a result of a variety of influences. This paper refers specifically to the history of sex and to recent work in genetics in order to demonstrate that sex, like gender is a discursive construction. I argue that the sex/gender problematic is wrong to assume biological differences are naturally given and that sex cannot operate as a natural base in a theory of difference.

Fetishism and the social value of objects

Abstract: The idea of the fetish has a particular presence in the writings of both Marx and Freud. It implies for these two theorists of the social, a particular form of relation between human beings and objects. In the work of both the idea of the fetish involves attributing properties to objects that they do not 'really' have and that should correctly be recognised as human. While Marx's account of fetishism addresses the exchange-value of commodities at the level of the economic relations of production, it fails to deal in any detail with the use-value or consumption of commodities. In contrast Freud's concept of the fetish as a desired substitute for a suitable sex object explores how objects are desired and consumed. Drawing on both Marx and Freud, Baudrillard breaks with their analyses of fetishism as demonstrating a human relation with unreal objects. He explores the creation of value in objects through the social exchange of sign values, showing how objects are fetishised in ostentation. This paper argues that while Baudrillard breaks with the realism characteristic of Marx's and Freud's analyses of fetishism, he does not go far enough in describing the social and discursive practices in which objects are used and sometimes transformed into fetishes. It is proposed that the fetishisation of objects involves an overdetermination of their social value through a discursive negotiation of the capacities of objects that stimulates fantasy and desire for them.

Whom Can You Trust? The Politics of ‘Grassing’ on an Inner City Housing Estate:

Abstract: This paper derives from an ongoing research project concerned to explore how people living in, going to work in, attending school in, high crime areas manage their routine daily lives. It focuses on one of our research areas in which we argue that the question of the ‘fear of crime’ is much better understood through an appreciation of how the question of trust manifests itself in that community. In other words, whom you trust, when, and by how much, mediate the way in which people living in this area manage their routine daily lives and within that their sense of security.

Inside knowledge: second order measures of skill

Abstract: This paper is intended as a contribution to the sociology of skill. Research which suggests that skills and their transmission are the properties of communities leaves unanswered the question of how information may be explicitly transmitted and acquired as part of the process of leaning a skill. Second-order studies of skill accept that skill acquisition occurs within a culture, but then go on to examine in detail which aspects of skills can be explicated and which cannot. Such a second-order study is presented here. Observations of veterinary surgery are used to identify a quasi-quantitative measure of skill acquisition – hardness. This measure is useful in understanding how task uncertainty is resolved in practice and how new skills are learnt.

Sharing Food at Home and School: Perspectives on Commensality:

Abstract: Sharing meals together, both in terms of their social construction and the social rules which govern behaviour, is thought to be the essence of our sociality. Teaching and Learning about Food and Nutrition in Schools (reported by Burgess and Morrison in 1995) is an ESRC funded project, which, as part of the Nation's Diet Programme: The Social Science of Food Choice investigated food use and eating in schools. Prior to the project social scientists had seldom focused upon the social and educational contexts in which children and young people learned about food as classroom activity, as routinised eating in schools, or at the interface between home and school. It is at the meeting point of such interests that this paper on the social significance of eating together is framed. Interview and diary data from parents, ‘dinner ladies’ and pupils, in combination with research observations, are used to explore familial perspectives on the changing relationship between eating at home and school in two primary school case studies. The discussion of school eating arrangements highlights the complex issues underpinning the advocacy of school meals, not only in terms of nutritional impact but also in relation to the cross-cutting effects of institutional practice, socio-economic advantage and disadvantage, and cultural preference. The alleged decline of the ‘proper’ shared meal is also contested. Rather, the data show commensality being produced and reproduced in different forms.

‘All Red in the Face’: Students' Views on School-Based HIV/AIDS and Sexuality Education:

Abstract: School-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education is a fraught area, the site of struggles around moral values, knowledge, the nature of childhood and adolescence and pedagogy. The dominant discourses on HIV/AIDS and sexuality education in Australian secondary schools, as evident in policy documents, are currently predominantly libertarian and therapeutic, championing the need for ‘openness’ in the interests of the students’ emotional maturity and social responsibility and their good health. However, Policy does not always translate readily into practice. This article draws upon a study involving focus group discussions with Australian senior high school students concerning their responses to the school-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education programmes in which they have taken part and other sources of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. The article focuses in detail upon the students’ valorizing of openness, trust and expertise in the face of the embarrassment, their perception of surveillance and their fears of lack of confidentiality that characterize their experience of HIV/AIDS and sexuality education. It is concluded that the nature of the teacher-adolescent relationship tends to work against the achievement of the objectives of such education.

Young Environmentalists: Post-Modern Identities or Middle-Class Culture?:

Abstract: The dominance of certain fractions of the ‘new middle class’ within the environmental movement seems beyond dispute. As regards youth, on the other hand, involvement in ‘new social movements’ is of...

The domestic basis for the managerial career

Abstract: Although there are now many studies of managers, there has been little research on how gender relations in the private sphere are lived to accommodate the managerial career. The organisation of domestic life and the household division of labour has largely been neglected. This article examines the domestic basis of the managerial career. The data are drawn from a larger study of women and men senior managers in five multinational companies. The analysis reveals that the domestic arrangements necessary to sustain the life of a senior manager are very different for men and women, giving the lie to the myth that equality has been achieved. My argument is that for all the company initiatives designed to promote equal opportunities, the managerial career is still largely dependent upon the services of a wife at home, or a housewife substitute in the form of paid domestic services.

The importance of difference: conceptualising increased flexibility in gender relations at home

Abstract: In this paper we have three goals. First, to provide a critique of attempts to theorise in the area of intimate care and domestic division of labour which do not pay adequate attention to issues of...

The Sexual Division of Dieting: Women's Voices:

Abstract: This article reports the findings of focus group research on Australian women who have engaged in dieting practices to lose weight. There have been few qualitative sociological studies on dieting, despite it being a common practice among western women. From the empirical data in this study three distinct themes emerged: women participate in the perpetuation and reinforcement of the thin ideal; women clearly trade-off health in the pursuit of dieting to lose weight; and the dominant discourse of the thin ideal is not only mediated in various ways, but is also contested by a reverse discourse of size acceptance. A sociology of food and the body enables the discourses in the area of dieting women to be deconstructed, offering an insight into the gendered context of food, which has implications for the sociology of health and illness.

The confidential patient: the social construction of therapeutic relationships in general medical practice

Abstract: The interpersonal relationship between doctor and patient is fundamental to general medical practice. In this paper we explore the ways in which general practitioners make sense of the changing political economy of this relationship, as it is restructured by ideas about the patient as consumer, and as it increasingly constitutes the consultation as a point of interaction that may be intrinsically therapeutic. In particular, we explore the ways in which the consultation is the site of negotiated power relations between doctor and patient, and is the site of the doctor's negotiation of powerful discourses of professional and institutional identity.

Constructing Women's Psychological Health in Anti-Abortion Rhetoric:

Abstract: This paper considers the ways in which anti-abortion activists construct women's psychological experience of abortion and explores the rhetorical significance of this discourse in advancing the anti-abortion project In particular we examine how the psychological concept of ‘denial’ contained in the (proposed) diagnostic category of ‘Post-Abortion Syndrome’ allows anti-abortionists to ‘psychologise’ and therefore undermine alternative constructions of the experience of abortion Further, we explore how this construction of women's experience allows particular constructions of the foetus (ie, ‘unborn child') to be advanced (and naturalised) without reference to overtly political argumentation The significance of this development of the abortion debate and its implications for the dynamics of political mobilisation are discussed

The ‘family wage’ as a class-rational strategy

Abstract: This paper re-examines the debate about the class rationality of the working-class demand for a family wage and argues that this issue cannot be resolved without considering the feasibility of alternative strategies. Existing accounts are criticized for their unrealistic treatment of these alternatives and the constraints upon them and particularly for their neglect of the influence of the policies of employers and the state upon working-class strategies. The argument is supported by discussion of the economic and political context of the family wage demand in Britain up to the First World War and concludes that the strategy was more rational than many writers have suggested.

Football spectator behaviour in Argentina: a case of separate evolution

Abstract: There has been a separate and distinctive evolution of football related violence in Argentina. Fighting between rival gangs of fans in Argentina developed independently and considerably in advance of the modern phenomenon of football hooliganism in Britain. This case is argued using Argentine sources not previously translated into English. The distinctive features of Argentine football violence are described and the main differences in relation to England are outlined. Of paramount importance are the explicit political links of Argentine football clubs. Organised football preceeded democratic politics in Argentina which resulted in the new political parties utilising the football infrastructure of neighbourhood-based clubs. The death rate associated with Argentine football is significantly higher than in England, and the role of the police is more negative in Argentina. In the conclusion a framework is proposed for the comparative and historical analysis of football related violence.

Inferiority: From collective status to deficient individuality.

Abstract: This article analyses ‘inferiority’ as a symbolic dimension of social inequality. In addition to being a position in the social hierarchy, inferiority signifies a feeling of deficient self-esteem, which has great significance for the understanding of social inequality. After examining the social preconditions of feelings of inferiority in class society, typical syndromes of feelings of inferiority will be investigated. As social inequality has become ‘individualised’, the social reference system of inferiority has become modernised as a symbolic construction of deficient individuality.

Achieving the indeterminate: Accomplishing degrees of certainty in life and death situations

Abstract: This paper explores technology's pivotal position at the intersection of control and uncertainty. It examines two areas: Intensive Care and a Labour Ward. Building on the work of Davis (1960), it argues that certainty and uncertainty are socially constructable and reconstructable. This is actively achieved by the deployment of strategies involving particular paradigms (the biomedical model) and artefacts (medical technology). Power lies in control over knowledge and the structures and practices which sustain it, including those embedded in advanced technology. The contribution of medical technology to the achievement of certainty in Intensive Care and end-game Obstetrics (the Labour Ward) is considered. Achieved certainty in medical situations is seen as: the structured masking of uncertainty by the application of medical iconography, artefacts and techniques to create the illusion of certainty. The accomplishment of uncertainty in Obstetrics (as a precursor to technological intervention) is also explored. The accomplishment of uncertainty in medical situations is seen as associated with the structured projection of uncertainty, involving using medical discourse rooted in the medical paradigm to exaggerate the generality of risk and the probability of pathology. It is argued that the highly structured and routinised settings of ICU and the labour Ward, not only aid control by the medical profession but diminish perceptions of uncertainty.

Persistent Militants and Quiescent Comrades: Intra-Industry Strike Activity on the Docks, 1947–89:

Abstract: Although dockers have figured prominently as a critical case in many standard theories of industrial conflict, they have often behaved in ways which these theories cannot grasp. This is perhaps most clearly evident when strike action at the port rather than the industry level is the subject of attention. Most notably, industry level theories cannot explain the persistent militancy of dockers employed in the major ports and the relative quiescence of their comrades employed at the smaller ports. To be sure, industry level variables can be used to understand the general character of workplace relations and the processes involved in strike action, but to fully explain the actual incidence and intensity of strike action over both time and place also requires analysis of the particular patterns of labour regulation at different ports and the consequent patterns of conflict and accommodation at the workplace level.

The Theoretical Underpinnings of Chicago Sociology in the 1920s and 30s

Abstract: This paper looks at the work of the Chicago School in the 1920s and 1930s from the standpoint of the debate between positivism and its critics within the discipline of sociology. It is argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, Chicago sociology at this time is based on a rejection of the principles of positivism. It is an attempt to apply the principles of interpretative understanding to the practical problems of empirical research.

Resisting sex/gender conflation: a rejoinder to John Hood‐Williams

Abstract: The irony of the rejection of the sex/gender distinction is that it renders sociology per se an impossible enterprise. For it is my submission that, contra Hood-Williams (1996) and others, the biological and the social constitute distinct, irreducible levels of reality: to conflate (in a ‘downwards’ or ‘upwards’ direction) the two levels is immediately to render analysis of their relative interplay at best intractable. It is indeed arguable that Hood-Williams is not so much concerned with (rightly) rejecting the so-called ‘additive’ approach to the biological and the social where the biological base is seen a priori as immutable, but more fundamentally with rejecting the necessary dualism of nature and culture (ie the biological and the social). In contradistinction, a realist defence of the sex/gender distinction will be made, involving critical reference to various major writers in the field and offering a brief but tentative discussion of the provenance of gender.

Normalisation and the psychology of 'mental retardation'

Abstract: The 1950 and 1960s witnessed a revival of interest among psychologists in mental retardation closely associated with the development of a behaviourist model. These developments effected a decisive break in the discourse of retardation by inserting a ‘behaviour’ component into the definition of retardation. This strengthened claims by psychology of professional primacy vis-a-vis medicine. The objective of professional assertion helped create the conditions in which the service model of Normalisation2 took root in North America and, to a lesser extent, the UK. As a semi-autonomous discourse, Normalisation provided a vehicle in which elements of contradictory discourses, principally psychology and interactionism, could be appropriated. The interventions which emerged from this comprised a dual strategy of enhanced social integration and the more precise definition and identification of mental retardation.

‘A Murderous ‘Underclass’? The Press Reporting of Sexually Motivated Murder:

Abstract: The ‘underclass’ is widely held by commentators of the Right to be responsible for a host of social problems, including violent crime. This paper shows how in the reporting of sexually motivated murder in a sample of nine British newspapers for one complete year (1992), the image constructed is one where unemployed and other marginalised men are portrayed as the main perpetrators of sexual violence. This, the authors argue, hampers our understanding of sexual violence, for it suggests that it is only men of a ‘low’ socio-economic background who are a potential threat to women and children. It is also suggested that the ‘symbolic environment’ of the press reporting of sexual murder provides a context in which a more authoritarian benefit regime and greater control of poor communities can be spuriously justified.

Max Weber's concept of patrimonialism and the Soviet system

Abstract: The concept of patrimonial domination was at first underutilized in western social science and then often used without proper clarification of its methodological basis. When the Soviet system was characterized as patrimonial, conceptual analysis was also generally lacking. In the article an attempt is made to fill in the gap between Weberian sociological theory and historical studies of Soviet society. It is argued that, although the concept of patrimonialism is applicable to the Stalinist system, this concept is not sufficient for the description of the Soviet state throughout its history. It is assumed in the article that Weber's concept of Beamtenmherrschaft might be more appropriate for the analysis of the post-Stalinist political regime in the USSR.

Personal Histories and Social Restructuring: The Transformation of a Peasant Society:

Abstract: Using the capacity of linked census data to combine two levels, individual and aggregate, and two dimensions, longitudinal and cross-sectional, the process of structural change is explored to reveal aspects of change which are usually hidden. North Troms, in North Norway, which still had a peasant economy at the end of the Second World War is used as an example. The trajectories of those economically active in 1960 and 1970 are disentangled then reassembled to show how they combined as structural change. Only a minority of personal histories paralleled the change in society as a whole. Much more structural change resulted from succession of cohorts leaving and entering the labour force. By joining the study of individuals to that of structures, it is possible to see how change occurs in the spaces between people, out of the effects of many contradictions.

'Staying on' : the effects of recent changes in educational participation for 17-19 year-olds in Norway and Scotland

Abstract: The article examines some of the implications of the growth of educational participation for the labor market integration of young people between 17 and 19 in Norway and Scotland. Not only has there been an increase in the proportion of young people who participate in post-compulsory schooling, but sections of the population who traditionally left school at the earliest possible opportunity are increasingly represented within the upper secondary school. With increasing demands for an educated labor force, it has sometimes been assumed that there is a link between educational expansion and meritocracy. On the other hand, the extension of schooling and certification may lead to qualification inflation and the middle classes may be successful in maintaining their advantages despite a greater openness in the education system at the lower levels. Although young Norwegians and young Scots have very different educational experiences, the two countries have similar size populations, they have comparable economic and industrial structures and the urban-rural settlement patterns bear remarkable similarities. However, in terms of political traditions and cultural inheritances, there are many dissimilarities.

Review article: Culture and the end of modernity

Abstract: Here are five more in what often appears an infinite fiow of books concerned with the interpretation of contemporary culture. Although they have a common theme of studying culture, these books do not by and large contain investigative reports. Instead they are more concerned with how one might go about such studies: indeed, it seems to be a routine assumption by these authors that debating the character of'cultural forms is an essential precondition before one could decide an appropriate methodology