Showing papers in "The Sociological Review in 2001"
TL;DR: In this article, a response to Ruth Holliday's article published in The Sociological Review in 2001 (48 (4): 503-22) "We've been framed: visualising methodology".
Abstract: This article was conceived as a response to Ruth Holliday's article published in The Sociological Review in 2001 (48 (4): 503–22) ‘We've been framed: visualising methodology'. Whilst recognising th...
135 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, independent money management is pursued in order to achieve equality and autonomy, thereby overcoming some of the difficulties identified in other forms of money management, however, it is argued that adherence to the goal of autonomy leads to the emergence of inequalities and the continued exercise of power within heterosexual relationships.
Abstract: This article focuses on the use of independent money management by a small number of cohabitants living in New Zealand. This style of money management seems to be popular with cohabitants and is likely to become increasingly significant as the number of couples who cohabit continues to grow in Western countries such as New Zealand. Yet it has received sparse attention within the literature on domestic monies. This literature has noted that money management practices operate either to diminish or to exacerbate inequalities between women and men, most noticeably in the realm of decision-making and personal spending money. Independent money management is pursued in order to achieve equality and autonomy, thereby overcoming some of the difficulties identified in other forms of money management. However, it is argued that equality and autonomy exist in tension with each other. In certain relational settings, adherence to the goal of autonomy leads to the emergence of inequalities and the continued exercise of power within heterosexual relationships.
125 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how people set about the task of national identity construction and maintenance in the context of a study of landed and arts elites in Scotland, and outline the key national identity processes: claim, attribution and the receipt of claims and attributions.
Abstract: This article examines how people set about the task of national identity construction and maintenance in the context of a study of landed and arts elites in Scotland. With reference to our empirical material throughout, we outline the key national identity processes: claim, attribution and the receipt of claims and attributions. Central to these are identity markers and rules. Identity markers are those social characteristics presented to others to support a national identity claim and looked to in others, either to attribute national identity, or receive and assess any claims or attributions made. Identity rules are probabilistic rules of thumb, guidelines to how these identity markers are interpreted, combined or given precedence over others within these three processes. Particular attention is given to identity rules, and consideration of the contexts in which they are adhered to or transgressed.
125 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the necessity of more detailed considerations of social action and human agency in sociological theorising on national identity is stressed. But, as much as other sociological categories such as ‘class’, ‘gender, race, categories of ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ are of important practical use in giving order to the social world, the need to more systematically consider how individuals actively organize and account for ideas of nation and national identity.
Abstract: This article stresses the necessity of more detailed considerations of social action and human agency in sociological theorising on national identity. It argues that, as much as other sociological categories such as ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘race’, categories of ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ are of important practical use in giving order to the social world. The article is primarily intended as a critique of a good deal of the sociological work in this area, and suggests the need to more systematically consider how individuals actively organise and account for ideas of nation and national identity. There is now a growing corpus of qualitative studies of national identity; what is needed now is to begin to work towards a general sociological theory of national identity.
106 citations
TL;DR: The human body has in recent years become a hot topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing as discussed by the authors, and the body has been variously a resour...
Abstract: The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resour...
93 citations
TL;DR: The beauty industry has been the subject of much critique but comparatively little empirical study as mentioned in this paper, which may be attributed to the fact that "beauty therapy as an industry is multi-faceted; as a set of practices it is complex".
Abstract: Beauty therapy as an industry is multi-faceted; as a set of practices it is complex. The beauty industry has been the subject of much critique but comparatively little empirical study. Based upon r...
86 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze the strategies of homeless street children in Moscow connected with the accumulation of social capital and show that children's social background plays an important role in their trajectories in the urban informal economy and society, and that they should not be viewed as a single dispossessed mass which has fallen through support networks in various risk scenarios.
Abstract: The paper analyses the strategies of homeless street children in Moscow connected with the accumulation of social capital. Based on recent empirical research, it looks at the involvement of children in non-criminal and criminal subcultures as a way to get access to important networks and resources, and shows how young people use their social skills and appropriate subcultural norms and values in order to build alternative careers. It demonstrates that children's social background plays an important role in their trajectories in the urban informal economy and society, and that they should not be viewed, as it is usually suggested in the social exclusion paradigm, as a single dispossessed mass which has fallen through support networks in various risk scenarios. Research data is reviewed to provide evidence that Moscow's homeless children are resourceful and deeply social agents who find surrogate families and ad hoc social memberships.
82 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a positive engagement between Bourdieu's sociology of practice and contemporary feminist theory would be mutually profitable, and they compare their account of the social c...
Abstract: This article argues that a positive engagement between Bourdieu’s sociology of practice and contemporary feminist theory would be mutually profitable. It compares Bourdieu’s account of the social c...
79 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the response of managers in selected Colleges of FE in England, and their discursive construction of new work identities, arguing that in mediating the reforms, managers adopt a range of responses and position themselves differentially to the discourses of "managerialism" and the "market".
Abstract: Since the mid-1980s. Further Education has experienced deep transformations as the result of market driven reforms and the emergence of ‘new managerialism’ in the sector. The changes affected its governance, purpose, organisation and culture, and had deep influence on the relations and identities in the workplace. This paper explores the response of managers in selected Colleges of FE in England, and their discursive construction of new work identities. It is argued that in mediating the reforms, managers adopt a range of responses and position themselves differentially to the discourses of ‘managerialism’ and the ‘market’. From enthusiastically adopting entrepreneurial management, to resisting, or quietly re-constructing vocabularies and practices to fit traditional models of professional practice, the managers in this study illustrate the contested nature of implementing reforms in the public sector, and the complex interplay between agency and institutional practice.
64 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that sociology's central concepts evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era, and that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the 'lived experience' of embodiment.
Abstract: This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the 'lived experience' of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology's central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to,writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses.
59 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the way that shared memory is employed by violent fans to sustain their relations with each other and made a contribution to the understanding of how social groups are constituted more generally through the empirical example of hooliganism.
Abstract: Since the 1970s, the sociological analysis of football hooliganism has focused on the processes which lead to violence between fans. This has been a reasonable research strategy since the incidence of violence is a striking phenomenon and violent fans themselves look upon violence as the objective. However, this focus on the causes of violence has cast other important aspects of football violence into the shade. In particular, there has been a lack of consideration of the way in which violence has been used as a resource by violent fans for the creation and re-creation of their hooligan gangs. In particular, there has been no discussion of the way in which the collective memory of violence, established in discussions between group members, affirms the solidarity of these groups. In exploring the way that shared memory is employed by violent fans to sustain their relations with each other, this article widens the focus of the sociological study of hooliganism but also makes a contribution to the understanding of how social groups are constituted more generally through the empirical example of hooliganism.
TL;DR: The role of war memorials and supermarkets in the 1995 revival of the 11th November silence for the war dead was examined in this article, where flowers were laid atid books of condoletice provided after the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
Abstract: Where do mobile, individualistic members of modem Britain spontaneously congregate, eg, for public mourning, atid what does this tell us about the construction of solidarity and a sense of society? Where flowers were laid atid books of condoletice provided after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 provides a case study. A survey of 147 cities, towns and villages found that churches were important in cities and villages, but elsewhere, town halls, war memorials, shops and public buildings provided the magnets to bring people together. The role of war memorials and supermarkets is then examined in an analysis of the 1995 revival of the 11th November silence for the war dead. This indicates a) the payoff for companies in showing that they care, b) the impori;ance of practical logistics of space and time. In a plural and secular society, ritual ‘words against death’ become ‘silences against death.’ These congregations of contemporary nomads may not be full-blown Durkheimian rites, but they are a representation of existing society at the same time as representing popular hope for a better society.
TL;DR: In the light of a critical account of Giddens' three recent books on politics (1994, 1998, 2000), the authors argues that it is possible to formulate a third way, that is different both form the ad hoc mixture of neo-liberal and conventional social-democratic recipes found in the Blair/Schroder type of discourse, as well as from Gaddens' utopianism that is blind to political economy realities.
Abstract: In the light of a critical account of Giddens' three recent books on politics (1994, 1998, 2000) this paper argues that it is possible to formulate a third way, that is different both form the ad hoc mixture of neo-liberal and conventional social-democratic recipes found in the Blair/Schroder type of discourse, as well as from Giddens' utopianism that is blind to political economy realities. This alternative version of the third way, guided by a non-economistic holistic framework should stress the continuous relevance of the Left-Right divide, ie, the continuities between early and late modernity and between the old and new emancipatory struggles against tyranny, exploitation and cultural/symbolic manipulation. It should also attempt to elaborate new reform proposals (in the area of the work, welfare, democracy, the life world) that take seriously into account the contradictions and present distribution of economic, political and cultural power, both on the national and the global level.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how "calls to account" are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations, and how such gaps affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick.
Abstract: This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co-presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’.
Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets.
The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co-presence’.
TL;DR: The authors argue that motorcycling accidents need to be seen as real physical events, the understanding of which is socially contested, and they attempt to show how these different approaches to risk can be theoretically reconciled.
Abstract: The manners in which motorcyclists and road safety experts assess motorcycling diverge widely. Experts view it as an extremely risky venture and imply that only the foolhardy would engage in it. Our own survey research appears to support this view. And yet, motorcyclists disagree with this assessment and construct their own theory of risk. One in which blame is laid at the door of the car culture and accidents something that can be overcome by road skills. The view of the experts concern with their risk taking becomes redefined as the attempted imposition of social regulation. We attempt to show how these different approaches to risk can be theoretically reconciled. We argue that motorcycling accidents need to be seen as real physical events, the understanding of which is socially contested.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors set out certain simple empirical factors related to the nature first of politics in cyberspace and second culture in cyber-culture in online life, and the assumption that cyber-space is constituted by individuals is revealed as an assumption of both, and connection between, cyberpolitics and cybercultures.
Abstract: A significant number of theories concerning the nature of cyberspace or virtuality are being constructed with little regard for the empirical realities of online life. This article sets out certain simple empirical factors related to the nature first of politics in cyberspace and second culture in cyberspace. These questions are posed as 'what is the politics of cyberculture?' and 'what is the culture of cyberpolitics?'. The politics of cyberculture revolves around issues of grossly uneven regional distribution of the Internet and a bias toward anglo-american language and culture that is based on the competitive individual. The culture of cyberpolitics revolves around informational forms of libertarian and anarchist ideologies that posit cyberspace as the realm of individual freedom. These cultures and politics can be related to each other as the structure and action of cyberspace. The assumption that cyberspace is constituted by individuals is revealed as an assumption of both, and connection between, cyberpolitics and cybercultures.
TL;DR: In this paper, a specific aspect of the present restructuring of space: the cumulative, but unintended, effects on the public urban order, by a growing, and more intense, deployment of border controls is discussed.
Abstract: This paper is about a specific aspect of the present restructuring of space: the cumulative, but unintended, effects on the public urban order, by a growing, and more intense, deployment of border controls. Border controls are recognized to operate both in public space, and at the entrances to those organized activities that directly face public space. Their working is understood as actuarial practices. Two preventive impetuses are identified, one specific, police-related, one general, related to the on-going socio-economic changes.To try to follow the aggregate effects of such a preventive spatial restructuring, an analytic thought experiment is made. Its focus is the public order in a square, or a segment of a street, located centrally in a relatively large Western European city and the effects of the following variations. To begin with, the targets of border controls: the volume and the composition of, first, the passers by, and second, the direct visitors of this public space, and third, different vis...
TL;DR: The South Yorkshire town of Rotherham was heavily hit by the economic changes of the late 1970sand 80s and its recent history manifests many of the consequences of these changes.
Abstract: Over the last twenty years fundamental changes have taken place in this society that have altered the social landscape of this country and entrenched the grounds of its nationhood, making clearer the nature of Englishness as an exclusive form, forbidden for many. A series of economic policies, pursued for political as well as fiscal ends, have actively impoverished the bottom third of our society. De-industrialization and new technologies have been used to create conditions of employment that have disempowered the working-class. Certainly areas like South Yorkshire, South Wales and industrial Scotland have seen formerly proud working communities slide into confused, atomized, isolated ways of living based in low wages and state benefit amidst rising crime rates and drug and alcohol-related social problems that are clearly indices of a general change in the communities' former way of life. A sense of what all this might mean is elucidated by looking at a locality that exemplifies the changes that have occurred. The South Yorkshire town of Rotherham was heavily hit by the economic changes of the late 1970sand 80s and its recent history manifests many of the consequences of these changes. Deindustrialization and economic restructuring meant a decline in the number of available jobs and thus increases unemployment. In October 1980 the unemployment rate was estimated to be 8% in Rotherham, compared with the national rate of 5.5%. The highest levelsof unemployment were recorded in January 1986, when 24,580 people were registered as unemployed, an unemployment rate of 23.5%. At that point the national unemployment rate was 13.9%. The late 1980s saw a reduction in the numbers of unemployed nationally, and by July 1990 the national figure stood at 6.4% whilst Rotherham's unemployed numbered 12,017, or 12.8%. In January of 1992 unemployment in the area had risen to 14.7% and rose again to 15.6% in January of 1993, when 14,980people were officially registered as unemployed. Furthermore, Rotherham has one of the highest rates of long-term unemployment in the country. The link between high unemployment and a low wage economy and poverty are clear in reports like the following:
TL;DR: The authors examines the commitments enshrined in the Strategic Defence Review White Paper to make the armed forces more genuinely representative of the British population, notably with respect to ethnicity, and identifies some conceptual problems associated with the way in which those commitments are presented and with the arguments usually deployed in support of their pursuit.
Abstract: This paper examines the commitments enshrined in the Strategic Defence Review White Paper to make the armed forces more genuinely representative of the British population, notably with respect to ethnicity. It identifies some conceptual problems associated with the way in which those commitments are presented and with the arguments usually deployed in support of their pursuit. It suggests that a fundamental re-assessment is required of the concept of representativeness, which is at the heart of current policy commitments, if their planned practical outcomes are to be achieved. The paper asks whether a shift in focus from equal opportunities to diversity offers the prospect of resolving some of the dilemmas and obstacles identified. It concludes by suggesting that the concept of diversity is itself not unproblematic – particularly in a military context – and that it could offer a solution only if it were embraced hand in hand with a much more explicit acceptance of the diversity of the political community....
TL;DR: In this paper, a study of seven Japanese owned and managed enterprises in western countries has been conducted to understand the linguistic patterns associated with cross-cultural communication in co-operative working environments.
Abstract: Previous research into Japanese owned and managed enterprises in western countries has been alert to problems in cross-cultural communication but there has been little research into the linguistic patterns accompanying these activities. This study of seven such plants in Scotland illustrates key features of the linguistic patterns evident in them. Forms of pidgin develop in co-operative working environments but unusually they are based on the language of the formal subordinates, local English speaking managers and workers. In contrast, and more in line with expectations from socio-linguistic theory, the local dialect is used as a device to promote local workforce solidarity against expatriate management. The former discrepancy between material and cultural power, which is not expected on the basis of Bourdieu's and related theories of cultural behaviour, is explained in terms of the differing career paths of Japanese and non-Japanese personnel, the marginal involvement of Japanese management in the local society and their reticence in asserting cultural power commensurate with their economic power. However, these lingusitic developments were local phenomena that did not challenge Japanese managerial control, both local and corporate, of decisions on development and investment. Hence, the opposition between cultural and material power may be permitted to persist because of these limited effects.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the relationship between technology and problems of social order/disorder in the context of discussions of surveillance and virtuality, and the emphasis is on understanding the co...
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between technology and problems of social order/disorder in the context of discussions of surveillance and ‘virtuality'. The emphasis is on understanding the co...
TL;DR: In this article, Howson and Inglis make five claims about the emergence of sociological interest in "the body" and their contention is that their argument is fundamentally flawed.
Abstract: Howson and Inglis' paper is both timely and thought provoking. However, it is my contention that their argument is fundamentally flawed. They make five claims. The first two concern the emergence of sociological interest in ‘the body’ and are sound in my view. The third is that the work of Merleau-Ponty, which has been central to many forms of ‘corporeal sociology’, lacks an account of social structure and is insufficiently sociological in focus to be of use t o sociology. The fourth suggests that the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which might be deemed a corrective to Merleau-Ponty, cannot serve this purpose without generating a form of social structural determinism which would undermine the benefits of Merleau-Ponty's contribution. The fifth speculates on whether cultural studies might not provide a more fruitful avenue for those who wish either to avoid determinism or to rejoin Merleau-Ponty. My main contention is with the third and fourth of these claims, though my view also necessarily has implications for the fifth.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that traditional photographic images of people in the Scottish islands represent them as marginal and romantic, determined survivors become quaint curiosities, and the specific uses made of photographs by local communities suggest that these pictures also provide a resource for cultural accounting.
Abstract: 'Traditional’ photographic images of people in the Scottish islands represent them as marginal and romantic, determined survivors become quaint curiosities. The discourse of modernity has produced a dichotomy between contemporary society and a pre-industrial Arcadia that is vividly reflected in the emphasis on the anthropological ‘otherness’ of island ways of life. Yet whilst such stereotypes are evident from the archival record, the specific uses made of photographs by local communities suggests that these pictures also provide a resource for cultural accounting. Like the ‘reckoning of kin’ or the cataloguing of place names and archaeological sites, photographs constitute a shared basis for establishing awareness of an authentic, distinctive and continuous self-identity. The view constructed by outsiders may thus be contrasted with a competing indigenous appropriation: the one stresses the schisms rent by transformed relations of production; the other counters modernisation theory in its celebration of c...
TL;DR: The authors highlights some distinctive features of the French School of sociology by uncovering four principles that support the works of Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu: the fierce attachment to rationalism, the refusal of pure theory and the defense of the undividedness of social science, the relation to historicity and historiography, and recourse to ethnology as a privileged device for indirect experimentation.
Abstract: This article highlights some distinctive features of the French School of sociology by uncovering four principles that support the works of Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu: the fierce attachment to rationalism, the refusal of pure theory and the defense of the undividedness of social science, the relation to historicity and historiography, and the recourse to ethnology as a privileged device for indirect experimentation. It is argued that Bourdieu both relies on and twists those pillar-principles to support a scientific edifice endowed with an original architecture, at once closely akin to and sharply different from that of the Durkheimian mother-house
TL;DR: Bouazizi et al. as mentioned in this paper pointed out that Bourdieu never goes so far as to grant the a priori universality of reason: he differentiates himself from a typically philosophical approach to universalism by demanding a Realpolitik of reason, which would permit 'thinking universally', without presupposing universal reason.
Abstract: One theme takes on a growing significance in the reflection of Pierre Bourdieu: that of universality. Not that he recants from his critique of universalization used as a strategy of legitimation ... nor that he ceases to assert that interest in the universal is the principal factor in promoting the universal; but he increasingly places the accent on the conditions for realizing universality, whether it be at an historical level with the study of strategies of monopolization of the universal in 'Spirits of the State' (1998: 58-60) or whether it be at the level of the constitution of social fields (political, scientific ...), the agents of which may have an interest in the advancement of the universal (1998: 90-1, 137). If we count as reason not solely the fundamental principles governing thought, but also the rules which make for collective understanding within a given social group, we have to acknowledge that Bourdieu never goes so far as to grant the a priori universality of reason: he differentiates himself from a typically philosophical approach to universalism by demanding a Realpolitik of reason, which would permit 'thinking universally', without presupposing universal reason. It is within this perspective that we can make complete sense of his increasingly frequent allusions to Habermas. In brief, the latter tries to rethink human action by elaborating a theory of society founded on reason (or even by elaborating a theory of knowledge constructed like a theory of society (Habermas, 1987». But while he (Habermas) pre-supposes the universality of reason and the existence of universalizable interests in order to lay the foundations for both rational consensus and a potential for social existence, Bourdieu takes the uniqueness of social interaction as his starting-point in order to study the conditions for the emergence of the universal and rationality. It would, however, be an error to adopt an opposition of the type: Habermas the Philosopher versus Bourdieu the Sociologist. Without neglecting the fact that their respective approaches go in opposite directions, the question is rather whether they can meet without ceasing also to confront one another over a certain number of theoretical stakes. Indeed, points of convergence are not lacking ... philosophy and the social sciences seem today to be succumbing
TL;DR: The idea of mass is to be a source from which worlds are continually being made through the repeated double movement of collection and dispersion as discussed by the authors, which can be seen as a metaphor for the prodigality of mass.
Abstract: Mass is a term that resists easy interpretation. It has a variable history, with different meanings for different people at different periods. Its early, religious interpretation saw it as prodigious, life-giving matter that could be shaped into the multifarious creative expressions of human culture. Later, in classical science, it was physical substance that could be handled, weighed and measured. Later still, through the relentless interrogations of modern science, mass seemed to evade precise characterisation; its mutable nature exposed it to infinite interpretation; it could only be expressed as a specific product of a specific experimental set-up. Its popular meaning associates it with quantity and bigness of scale, which we see in such common expressions as mass consumption, mass production, mass media and mass culture. These expressions of social and economic mass not only indicate large numbers and quantities but also, as the dictionary suggests, 'bewildering abundance'. Mass seems profligate, difficult to tame. This chapter explores these features of mass as the ceaseless movement of collection and dispersion, production and consumption, that specially characterizes mass society as it becomes more globalized. Mass is viewed not in the traditional sense of physical substance and volume but as a mutable and inexhaustible source from which worlds are continually being made through the repeated double movement of collection and dispersion. The incessant transmission of mass through collection-dispersion is elaborated through the analyses of mass phenomena by, among others, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, and illustrated in the practical settings of newspapers, film, the supermarket, the city, computerized electronic space-time, as well as in the enhanced role of the mass media in producing an ever more mobile reality through 'electronic mass'. Beneath the agitated mettle of the modern world, mass appears as a relentless and prodigious power that resists the very forces that give it social and cultural form. The prodigality of mass is stressed in Raymond Williams's (1983) cultural and social history of the term. Despite the variety of modern interpretations of mass, they all seem to reflect two basic earlier meanings: 'something amorphous and indistinguishable' and 'a dense aggregate' (Williams, 1983: 194). Mass is so dense that it is without distinguishable form. Put another way, mass is boundless, unfinished, infinite in the most basic sense of defying comprehension and resisting interpretation. Some sense of this
TL;DR: This article examined women's employment in Britain and Denmark and concluded that extensive part-time working for women, and not men, does indeed tend to reinforce a traditional male-breadwinner model.
Abstract: This paper examines women's employment in Britain and Denmark, societies characterised similarly by high proportions of female employees working part-time but by rather different gender arrangements. Part-time working is associated with female-carer workers; women who have reduced their hours in the labour market to bring up children and are able to do this because of the presence of an alternative source of income, usually a male breadwinner. Yet Denmark has been conceptualised as having more of a 'dual-breadwinner' gender arrangement than Britain. It would seem then, that part-time working is distinctly different in these two societies. Examining this question, the paper concludes that extensive part-time working for women, and not men, does indeed tend to reinforce a traditional male-breadwinner model. However, the strength of this reinforcement varies, depending on the relative conditions of the part-time labour market. These conditions vary substantially cross-nationally and can also change rapidly within one society over time. As a result, the typical 'role' a part-time job plays for women can also vary cross-nationally and can change over time.
TL;DR: Bourdieu's contribution to this problematic, whilst clearly indebted to the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Michael Baxandall and the 'genetic structuralism' of Lucien Goldmann (see Bourdieu, 1996: 313,179; 1992: 69) is both sui generis and nu/lis secundus as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The idea that art is an embedded social activity is neither new nor particularly remarkable. It forms the starting point for any sociology or history of art worthy of the name. While ideologies of cultural transcendence and romantic isolation still undergird popular and elite delineations of the artistic object (revealing, indeed, the extent to which the former has taken on, or 'misrecognized' the discourse of culture as nature), they no longer rest so easily in the firmament of scholarly and artistic life. Both the 'critical' and 'empirical' traditions of writings on art (Chaplin, 1994) have steered analysis towards extra-aesthetic factors that reside in the art-society problematic whether they be the effects of capitalism, class and dominant ideology in the writings of Lukacs, Hauser, Max Raphael and T.J. Clark, the mundane practices of the artist's 'support personnel' in Becker's (1982) institutional ethnography, or the sophisticated and cross-cutting influences of gender, race, language and power in the work of the 'new art historians' (Wolff, 1981; Zolberg, 1990; Pollock, 1988; Rees and Borzello, 1986). Bourdieu's contribution to this problematic, whilst clearly indebted to the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Michael Baxandall and the 'genetic structuralism' of Lucien Goldmann (see Bourdieu, 1996: 313,179; 1992: 69) is both sui generis and nu/lis secundus. It provides the most wide-ranging, analytically sophisticated and empirically productive set of concepts available, to represent the intricate mediations between artistic practice and social space. The concept of field (champ), in particular, marks the development of a 'science of the sacred' (see Swartz, 1997: 47), of artistic practice, that takes analysis beyond fuzzy references to 'context', 'art world' and 'institution' (Danto, 1999). I Field, instead, suggests the existence of partially independent regions of social activity, such as artistic practice, structured according to a relational set
TL;DR: The role of the American Christian Right (CR) as an international social movement has perhaps received less attention than it is due as discussed by the authors, and the underlying global vision of the CR, and the ways in which this vision shapes the CR's international political activism.
Abstract: The role of the American Christian Right (CR) as an international social movement has perhaps received less attention than it is due. In this article, I explore the underlying global vision of the CR, and the ways in which this vision shapes the CR's international political activism. I focus on the CR's construction of the United Nations, examining various CR genres including movement publications, fiction, and prophecy writing. I also attempt to analyse the CR's ideological stance in light of the literature on ‘religion and globalisation’.Imperatives for the future include: To take energetic action within the NGO process to blunt or prevent new assaults on family integrity; to identify, protect, and help advance existing ‘friends of the family’ within the U.N. Secretariat; to ‘place’ such friends in positions of current or potential influence within the U.N. Secretariat; And to build an international movement of ‘religiously grounded family morality systems’ that can influence and eventually shape social...