Showing papers in "The Sociological Review in 2007"

Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

Abstract: Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio-technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.

The ambivalence of ordinary cosmopolitanism: Investigating the limits of cosmopolitan openness

Abstract: Despite diverse understandings of cosmopolitanism, most authors agree that cosmopolitans espouse a broadly defined disposition of 'openness' toward others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non-local. It is argued that such an attitude is expressed by an emotional and ethical commitment towards universalism, selflessness, worldliness and communitarianism, and that such values should be identifiable in the practices, attitudes and identifications of individuals. By using data generated through qualitative focus group research, this paper extends the development of Lamont and Aksartova's (2002) category of 'ordinary cosmopolitanism'. The participants in this study saw themselves as beneficiaries of an increasingly interconnected world, and they generally expressed cosmopolitan sentiments by referring to easily accepted opportunities associated with globalisation (eg. travel, cuisine, music) rather than the more difficult aspects of openness such as showing hospitality to strangers, or accepting human interest ahead of perceived national interests. Their positive views were counterbalanced, however, by sentiments of 'dilution of national culture' and 'culture loss'. We argue that cosmopolitanism is a set of structurally grounded, discursive resources available to social actors which is variably deployed to deal with issues like cultural diversity, the global, and otherness. Ironically these discourses, which are the basis of the everyday accounts we describe, mirror academic debates on globalisation, suggesting the immersion of theorists in these discursive webs of meaning that structure responses to things global.

Ethnic ties: social capital and the question of mobilisability

Abstract: This paper reflects on the concept of social capital through a discussion of the differential uses of ethnic ties for minority ethnic groups.It is argued that we should confine the notion of social...

Calculators, lemmings or frame-makers? The intermediary role of securities analysts

Abstract: As Wall Street specialists in valuation, sell-side securities analysts constitute a particularly important class of market actor. Analysts produce the reports, recommendations and price targets that professional investors utilize to inform their buy and sell decisions, which means that understanding analysts’ work can provide crucial insights on the determinants of value in the capital markets. Yet our knowledge of analysts is limited by insufficient attention to Knightian uncertainty. Analysts estimate the value of stocks by calculating their net present value or by folding the future back into the present. In so doing, they are faced with the fundamental challenge identified by Frank Knight, that is, with the difficulty of making decisions that entail a future that is unknown. These decisions, as Knight wrote, are characterized by ‘neither entire ignorance nor complete . . . information, but partial knowledge’ of the world (Knight, [1921] 1971: 199). The finance literature has not examined the Knightian challenge faced by analysts. Indeed, existing treatments circumvent the problem by adopting one of two extreme positions. In the first, put forward by orthodox economists, it is assumed that Knightian uncertainty is non-existent and that calculative decision-making is straightforward. Analysts are presented as mere calculators in a probabilistic world of risk (Cowles, 1933; Lin and McNichols, 1998; Lim, 2001). In the second, put forward by neo-institutional sociologists and behavioural finance scholars, analysts face too much uncertainty to engage in individual calculation. Analysts confront this uncertainty by resorting to a lemming-like imitation of their colleagues’ opinions (see respectively Rao, Greve and Davis, 2001; Scharfstein and Stein, 1990; Hong, Kubik and Solomon, 2000). None of these views, however, examines the Knightian challenge that analysts confront, namely, the imperative to decide with a significant but limited knowledge of the world. In recent years, an emerging sociological literature has begun to redress this neglect of Knightian uncertainty by viewing analysts as critics. According to the

Love Labour as a distinct and non-commodifiable form of Care Labour

Abstract: This paper examines the nature of love labouring and explores how it can be distinguished from other forms of care work. It provides a three fold taxonomy for analysing other-centred work, distinguishing between work required to maintain primary care relations (love labour), secondary care relations (general care work) and tertiary care relations (solidarity work). A central theme of the paper is that primary care relations are not sustainable over time without love labour; that the realization of love, as opposed to the declaration of love, requires work. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and empirical sources, including a study of caring undertaken by the author, the paper argues that there is mutuality, commitment, trust and responsibility at the heart of love labouring that makes it distinct from general care work and solidarity work. It sets out reasons why it is not possible to commodify the feelings, intentions and commitments of love labourers to supply them on a paid basis.

'Ladettes' and 'Modern Girls':'troublesome' young femininities

Abstract: ‘Ladettes’ are argued to be a sign, and product, of contemporary development and change; their fortunes are presented as inextricably related to the conditions of late modernity. Using the past to shed light on the present, this paper considers whether fears and claims about the behaviour of some contemporary young women in Britain are exclusive to the present. Two data sets inform the discussion: first, representations of ladettes in national and local newspapers from 1995 to 2005; second, materials relating to the ‘modern girl’ published in the popular print media between 1918 and 1928. Although there have been important changes in the conditions of girlhood since the 1920s, this historical comparison highlights continuities in the representation of ‘troublesome’ youthful femininities. We explore similarities and differences in the characteristics attributed to the modern girls of the twenties and the ladettes of recent years, and the dominant discourses that underpin popular constructions of troublesome young women.

Choice and Chance: Negotiating Agency in Narratives of Singleness

Abstract: This article presents a discursive analysis of interview material in which single women reflect on their relationships and reasons for being single. Despite changing meanings of singleness, it remains a ‘deficit identity’ (Reynolds and Taylor, 2005) and the problem for a woman alone is to account positively for her single state. Our analysis challenges theorisations which would suggest autonomy and agency in how identity and self are constructed. It employs the methodological approaches developed in critical discursive psychology (for instance Wetherell, 1998) to look at the detailed identity work of speakers as part of the identity project proposed by Giddens (1992, 2005), Bauman (1998) and other writers associated with the ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis (Adkins, 2002). By approaching ‘choice’ as one of the cultural resources available to speakers, we present a more complex view of the dilemmas around a speaker's identity work in her accounting for her relationships and the course her life has taken

Scorecards as devices for consumer credit: the case of Fair, Isaac & Company Incorporated

Abstract: The object of interest in this research is called a ‘scorecard’ in the consumer lending industry, a calculating tool for selecting and managing consumers of credit. The technology’s name is an historical affectation, since early commercial scorecards were literally a simple sheet of cardboard on which was printed a statistically based point distribution to be added up by the lender. Designed from an odds-based prediction of risk, early scorecards served as an aid to establishing whether credit should be granted to a prospective applicant according to the person’s responses to a series of set questions. Today there is no card as ‘scorecards’ are embedded in sophisticated software packages and computer interfaces that co-ordinate between back-stage statisticians, electronic data warehouses, risk managers and front-stage marketing campaigns. Beyond the disappearance of the card, how the insides of the scorecard are constituted has also undergone significant transformations since the first scorecards were developed in the late 1950s, because the architecture of the algorithm or statistical model depends on the raw materials that have been used for its assembly. Without providing a full mathematical description of the scorecard, this chapter will nevertheless show that it is crucial to look closely at scorecard production if its significance as a ‘market device’ is to be understood, since differences in scorecard design and implementation can significantly change how the technology constitutes markets through risk calculation. Most academic writings refer to a 1941 report by David Durand (c1941), published through the National Bureau of Economic Research as the first known application of statistical methods to the problem of selecting credit applicants, but it is unclear how influential this work was on any systems that might have emerged in practice. What is certain is that quantified credit application screening, while far from widespread, were initiated independently in a number of retail, mail order, and financial credit services reportedly starting as early as the 1940s (Lawrence and Solomon, 2002: 44). As with other historical movements of statistics, techniques for treating the credit application problem probabilisti-

Sociology and the body: classical traditions and new agendas

Abstract: Reflecting developments in consumer culture, the politics of social movements, public health policy, and medical technologies, the body has since the early 1980s become one of the most popular and ...

Researching embodiment by way of ‘body techniques’

Abstract: In this chapter I reflect upon the importance of Marcel Mauss’ concept of ‘body techniques’ for facilitating an empirical analysis of embodiment. I begin by arguing that sociology is not guilty of ...

A Sociology of Market-Things: On Tending the Garden of Choices in Mass Retailing:

Abstract: In its attempt to challenge economic explanations of market choices, the (now not so) ‘new economic sociology’ proposed to investigate the social (Granovetter, 1985), cultural (Zelizer, 1985; Abolafia, 1996) and political (Fligstein, 1996) ‘embeddedness’ of market behaviour. This research effort has been very useful in fleshing out economic exchanges, moving their investigation beyond abstract structures and stylized actors. The new economic sociology has given sociologists some robust tools and efficient theories for investigating the richness and humanity of economic activities and processes. Since it tends to reduce market realities to their human dimensions (networks, ideas and institutions), however, this perspective ends up neglecting the role of objects, technologies and other artefacts in framing markets (Chantelat, 2002). Michel Callon’s Laws of the Markets (1998) may be seen as an attempt to fill in this gap. Callon proposed as a focus, the technical and intellectual devices shaping market exchanges. To a certain degree, this programme may be presented as a fourth contribution to the new economic sociology paradigm, a contribution that insists on the ‘cognitive/technological’ embeddedness of markets. Yet this would only be accurate if Callon and his colleagues could be said to think of a market reality as being ‘embedded’ in some kind of social context! In the very same way that Bruno Latour refuses the idea of an ‘ever there’ ‘social stuff’ encompassing everybody and everything, preferring to define the word ‘social’ as an association process mixing and connecting human and non-human matters and issues (Latour, 2005), one might consider that for ‘ANT-driven’ economic sociology ‘market’ and ‘social’ realities are neither separated nor subject to the precedence of the other. Rather they are both combined and produced through ‘socio-economic’ action. In this chapter I propose, to follow along the latter perspective, to move from a sociology of marketing – ie, of how market knowledge ‘performs’ economic action (Cochoy, 1998) – to a sociology of ‘market-things’ – ie, of how commercial objects, frames and tools equip consumer cognition (Cochoy, 2004). In other words, I suggest abandoning market theories and opening our eyes to

A market of opinions: the political epistemology of focus groups

Abstract: Provoking a conversation among a small group of people gathered in a room has become a widespread way of generating useful knowledge.1 The focus group is today a pervasive technology of social investigation, a versatile experimental setting where a multitude of ostensibly heterogeneous issues, from politics to economics, from voting to spending, can be productively addressed.2 Marketing is the field in which the focus group has acquired its most visible and standardized form, as an instrument to probe and foretell economic behaviour by anticipating the encounter of consumers and products in the marketplace.3 But whether they are used to anticipate consumer behaviour in a laboratory-like setting, or to produce descriptions of political attitudes, conversations elicited in the 'white room' of the focus group are relevant to a striking range of objects of social-scientific inquiry.4 The observation of contrived groupings of research subjects in 'captive settings' is of course a familiar source of knowledge in the social sciences, but there is something peculiar to the focus group as a research technology. In focus groups, knowledge is generated in the form of opinions. Moreover, a group dynamic is used to bring into existence a series of relevant individual opinions; the peculiar form of social liveliness of the focus group is meant to 'produce data and insights that would be less accessible without the interaction found in a group' (Morgan, 1988: 12). Both the productive qualities and methodological quandaries of the focus group originate in its special form of liveliness. The peculiar politics and epistemology of a focus group conversation derive from the tension implied in using a group to engender authentically individual opinions. Moderators are in charge of resolving this tension: they must make the conversation conducive to the expression of private and idiosyncratic views, while preventing the focus group from rising to the status of a 'collective;' they are called to structure a process of interaction conducive to the elicitation and elucidation of the most private of views, while reducing to a minimum the residuum of 'socialness' left over from the process. As a professional group moderator describes it: We talk to ourselves all the time. Most of these inner thoughts never surface. They reflect the same kind of internal dialogue we have when we stand at a supermarket shelf to select paper towels or stop to take a closer look at a magazine ad for a new cell-phone service or decide whether to use a credit card to pay for gas. Our running commentary is often so subliminal that we often forget it's going on. As a focus group moderator, I reach out to consumers in my groups and try to drag that kind of information out of them and into the foreground. What I do is a kind of marketing therapy that reveals how we as consumers feel about a product, a service, an ad, a brand. (Goebert, 2002: viii) Researchers hope to externalize the silent 'running commentary' of consumers by means of an intently managed group discussion, to translate a series of inaudible monologues into a visible conversation. They provoke an exchange so as to bring to light the inner qualities of consumers. Knowledge about people is extracted from the opinions elicited from them – opinions that are freely expressed by the subjects, yet structurally incited by the setting.5 Those opinions are then selected, categorized and interpreted by the focus group researcher and fed into production and marketing strategies. 'Illustrative opinions' are filtered from the wealth of talk generated in the discussion, to be quoted verbatim or paraphrased in the research reports circulated to clients and other relevant audiences. Thus, opinions generated in the 'white room' are read, interpreted, and discussed by managers and marketers who were not present in the original conversation and are in no position to directly assess their authenticity or relevance. The statements produced in the unique environment of the focus group enter a long chain of quoting and rephrasing, and reverberate into other actors' market strategies. The ultimate product of a focus group conversation is a series of tradable opinions – statements that are generated in an experimental setting but can be disseminated beyond their site of production. Opinions elicited from focus group participants thus help constitute particular marketplaces. Producing opinions of such value and mobility is a highly complex technical process. A focus group can generate a multitude of objects that, while seemingly identical to relevant opinions, are in fact radically different kinds: false opinions, induced judgments, or insincere beliefs, all of which appear profusely in the course of a focus group discussion – especially in a poorly run one. These deceptive statements must be sorted out and expunged so as not to lead researchers and their audiences astray. The task of the moderator is to manage the focus group discussion so as to limit the proliferation of irrelevant or inauthentic viewpoints; to foreground tradable opinions against the background noise that is inevitably generated in the experimental situation. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to some of the strategies utilized by focus group moderators to carry out this task of extracting tradable opinions out of experimentally generated conversations. In so doing, we can regain a proper appreciation of the extent to which categories such as 'relevant opinion' or 'consumer preference' are problematic – and not simply or primarily to the external observer, but to the actors who are professionally trained to elicit and recognize them, the focus group moderators. My account will be limited in a number of important ways. The manufacture of opinions in a focus group starts with the assembling of a group of adequate research subjects and a meeting with one or more moderators, but the 'focus group chain' comprises a long sequence of exchanges and analyses beyond this initial encounter. This chapter, however, will only investigate the initial experimental moment, when research subjects and moderators come together in the physical setting of the focus group 'white room.' Moreover, I will analyse this encounter solely from the perspective of the moderators: my analysis is based on the moderators' own technical literature – the training manuals, methods handbooks, autobiographical accounts, and other documents in which they lay out their own philosophy of 'good practice' and a portrayal of the 'good moderator.' I do not attempt to examine the focus group discussion from the point of view of the research subjects, nor will I draw extensively on analyses of the patterns of interaction between subjects and moderators that actually emerge in a focus group, a dimension of the focus group encounter that others have studied at some length (Myers, 1998 and 2004; Myers and Macnaghten, 1999; Puchta and Potter, 1999 and 2003). The chapter is thus limited to descriptions of the craft of moderation that professional moderators have put into writing.6 Through this literature, I try to reconstruct an ideal moral epistemology of moderation. In particular, I try to capture the political constitution of an experimental setting in which individual attitudes are elicited and market behaviour is routinely anticipated. The chapter is organized around three themes, all of them topics that social scientists have frequently raised in relation to the production of scientific knowledge under experimental conditions: 1) the distinction and balance between naturalness and artificiality in the focus group setting, and the embodiment of this distinction in the moderator's skills and abilities (or, rather, in the accounts that moderators give of their own craft); 2) the co-production of knowledge and particular forms of social order, or the political constitution of the focus group – a constitution that ideally, I will argue, takes the form of an isegoric assembly; and finally, 3) the role of material artifacts and the physical arrangement of the setting in the organization of the 'focus group chain' as a technology of knowledge production. The chapter concludes with a call to make the production of opinions a proper object of sociological investigation, in the same way that the creation and circulation of knowledge has long occupied a central place in the agenda of sociological research.

The nostalgia for permanence at work? The end of work and its commentators

Abstract: This article examines a contemporary trend in the sociology of work that is labelled here the ‘end of work’ debate after Jeremy Rifkin's book of the same name. It explores this trend, suggesting that marked similarities exist between a range of authors in Europe and North America who propose that work regimes and the meaning derived from them are changing fundamentally. This literature is then placed in the context of an older canon on decline in work and employment. Using the insights of newer qualitative studies that have emerged over the last decade it is suggested that much of the ‘end of work’ type of writing over-generalises a complex situation, suggesting that sociology needs to incorporate macro theorisation with detailed empirical research if it is to properly understand changes in the contemporary world of work.

Framing Fish, Making Markets: The Construction of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs):

Abstract: The quota that is on offer, which would cost you in the order of NOK 1.0–1.3 million if you got the bid, is a right to fish a specific amount of a certain kind of fish. ‘9–10m’ is the length of the fishing vessel in relation to which the quota is defined. ‘gr 1’ is short for Group1, a basic category of fishing vessel defined within the management system for the coastal cod fishery in Norway. There are two such basic categories (Group1 and Group2), the first targeting full-time professional fishermen, the second reserved for part-timers. In 2005, the quota for a Group1 vessel of 9–10 meters would have been 65380 of ‘cod equivalents.’ As the above suggests, the commodity we have before us is a complex thing. Every phrase in the ad, including the date at the start and the phone number at the end, is packed with significance. While you, the model reader of this chapter, have no problem with the numbers that frame the ad (date and phone number), you are not pre-equipped with the lexicon required to decode the meaning of its key concepts. We shall try to turn this quality of the tradable quota into our advantage. Still, we would not be surprised if you, at this point, see the quota and the cod as just another case of fishy objects. At the end of the chapter, however, you will learn to appreciate these things in all their intricate beauty. Let us begin with the obvious. The ad indicates that a market for fish quotas exists. From the specifications in the ad (9–10m; gr 1; Nordland) and the rule systems these refer to, we understand that the fish quota is a legal construct. Without a formal apparatus to define and produce the fish quota as a stable

Breathing like a soldier: culture incarnate1

Abstract: Breathing appears to be so natural and organic that it hardly seems worth analyzing. Yet to inhabit an institution can mean having to learn to breathe in culturally distinct ways. This chapter presents the findings of an ethnographic study of ‘learning to breath like a soldier’ in the army. I focus on the processes by which the body is transformed and new disciplinary techniques are developed, and present the body as an alternative category of cultural analysis to a vision of military culture as the internalization of norms, values and beliefs that shape identities and provide cognitive frames for social action. Cultural patterning in the army is not an abstract intellectual process, but takes place at the level of the body as it engages in practical activity in the training environment, and becomes adapted to the military milieu.

Ambivalence and the paradoxes of grandparenting

Abstract: This paper focuses on ‘normative talk’ about grandparenting. It is based on a secondary analysis of a study involving 46 interviews with grandparents. It identifies two main cultural norms of grandparenting that emerged from the data – ‘being there’ and ‘not interfering’. There were very high levels of consensus in the study that these constituted what grandparents ‘should and should not’ do. However, these two norms can be contradictory, and are not easy to reconcile with the everyday realities of grandparenting. The study found that norms of parenting and also of self determination were also very important for the grandparents in the study. They had a keen sense of what being a ‘good parent’ (to their own adult children) should mean – especially in terms of allowing them to be independent – but this could sometimes conflict with their sense of responsibility to descendant generations of grandchildren. Using the concept of ambivalence and drawing on the accounts of grandparents in the study, the paper ex...

Listening to the dancer’s body

Abstract: This article examines the occupational culture of ballet, specifically looking at body awareness and body experiences. Using a phenomenological approach, complemented by ethnographic interview data, the experiences of the ballet dancer's body, in its daily training process, are described and analysed. Focusing on the dancer's attitudes to and dealings with pain and injuries, but also looking at the issue of eating disorders, the implications of this analysis for theorizing the body as a material and only contingently elusive phenomenon are explicated. Drawing on contemporary body theory, the meaning of injuries and pain are analysed in the context of ballet culture. The concept of the phenomenologically ‘absent body’ is used to understand the temporary disappearance of the body from awareness, while the notion that pain and illness can be considered a form of communication offers an insight into the relationship between the individual body and the social and cultural worlds it is part of. The use of an et...

Women in Parliament

Abstract: Percentage of parliamentary seats held by women 2005 or latest year available Did you know? Women are outnumbered by men in all the world’s parliaments. Women hold close to half the parliamentary seats in Rwanda and Sweden and about a third in the Nordic countries, in Cuba, Costa Rica and Argentina. There is no reliable relationship between how rich a country is, and how many women are in parliament. On the other hand, there does seem to be a link between the percentage of women in employment and the percentage of parliamentary seats held by women. The chart below plots the percentage of women in parliament against the percentage of the total female population of working age (15-64) in employment. Women’s participation in political life appears to reflect, at least to some extent, their participation in economic life. Percentages of women in parliament are high in Nordic countries where women make up a large part of the labour market and low in Turkey, Greece, Italy and Hungary.

Re‐defining ‘norms’: D/deaf young people's transitions to independence

Abstract: Traditionally, young people's transitions from a state of dependent childhood to an independent adult identity have been measured in terms of a developmental stage model. However, it is increasingly being recognised that young people are not a universal category and that their transitions need to be understood within the diverse context of peers, family, and communities. This paper draws on a rich body of work from the interdisciplinary field of Deaf studies and original research with D/deaf young people – a group generally overlooked by sociological research – to challenge and to advance conventional interdisciplinary debates about youth transitions in two ways. In the first half of the paper we examine D/deaf young people's conventional school-to-work, housing and domestic transitions and in doing so reflect upon the ways that their experiences shed a new light on understandings of these traditional markers of independent adulthood. In the second half of the paper we challenge conventional definitions of what marks an important transition by focusing on the transition that many D/deaf young people themselves define as the most significant in their lives, learning BSL and the transition to an independent D/deaf identity that this enables them to make. In doing so the paper mainstreams within sociology an important body of research about D/deaf people's experiences from Deaf studies.

Embodied knowledge in glassblowing: the experience of meaning and the struggle towards proficiency

Abstract: Becoming a proficient glassblower involves an indispensable shift away from cognitive readings of practice towards corporeal readings, marking the development of proficient practical knowledge. In learning glassblowing myself in the course of an ethnography of handicrafts in New York City, the subtleties of apprenticeship, the modes of reading and understanding the practice, both cognitive and corporeal, have emerged, complexifying our understanding of the transmission, development, and modalities of practical knowledge. Such ethnographic dissection brings phenomenological considerations to bear on the question of achieving proficient practical knowledge, and enables us to sharpen our understanding of the role of meaning in practice.

Re‐inscribing gender binaries: Deconstructing the dominant discourse around women's equality in science, engineering, and technology

Abstract: This paper tracks and attempts to unravel a persistently dominant discursive construction of the problem of women's under-representation in science, engineering, and technology (SET) education and work: the idea that the interaction of gender stereotyping with the masculine image of SET disciplines and workplaces prevents girls and women from choosing SET subjects and going into SET careers The discursive framework of 'Women in SET' will be examined at both macro and micro levels as it operates in the field of activist and pedagogic activity that has grown around the issue since the 1970s A Foucauldian analysis will be applied in order to explore the kinds of subject positions this framework enables and excludes It will be argued that the Women in SET framework re-inscribes the gendered binaries that have at a symbolic level defined girls/women and SET as mutually exclusive, and as a result practices based on this framework may be counter-productive because their subjectivating effects on girls and women may undermine their broad political aims

In good company: risk, security and choice in young people's drug decisions

Abstract: This article draws on original empirical research with young people to question the degree to which ‘individualisation of risk’, as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens, adequately explains th...

'Cultures of embodied experience: Technology, religion and body pedagogics’

Abstract: Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.

Whose Child is it Anyway? the Negotiation of Paternal Entitlements within Marriage:

Abstract: Based on qualitative research, this paper suggests that among some married/co-habiting couples, where mothers are professionally employed and there are pre-school children, fathers seek to enhance their paternal role. This contrasts with previous research, which indicates that married/co-habiting men leave to mothers the responsibility for nurturing both maternal and paternal relationships with children. Using the notions of situational and debilitative power, it is shown how married/co-habiting fathers developed strategies for augmenting paternal rights. While fathers' involvement with children was perceived as beneficial by some mothers, others regarded it as a threat to maternal status. The paper suggests that power relations between married/co-habiting parents in the sample are similar to power struggles between couples who are separated or divorced. The possibility is raised that paternal strategies to diminish the maternal sphere of influence among both married/co-habiting and divorced fathers may be symptomatic of wider male fears about the erosion of male hegemony. It is observed that the schemes employed by fathers in the sample to enhance the paternal role are similar to the approach advocated in policy statements of fathers' rights activists.

Making things deliverable: the origins of index‐based derivatives

Abstract: Index-based derivatives: financial contracts that use financial market indices as their underlying ‘assets’ are currently amongst the most commonly traded financial contracts (BIS, 2006). Furthermore, the introduction of index-based derivatives is considered by many as the single most significant development in contemporary financial markets (Chance, 1995; Arditti, 1996; Kolb, 1997a, 1997b). The use of index-based futures has become a standard practice in the financial world and today banks, pension funds, insurance companies and governments hold portfolios that include index-based derivatives. In fact, indexbased contracts have become such an indispensable feature of the global financial system that it would be safe to say that there are many millions in the West who own, either directly or indirectly (even unknowingly), index-based derivatives. In spite of their ubiquity in the financial world, index-based derivatives represent a fundamental ambiguity. Derivative contracts, as their name implies, derive their prices from the prices of a variety of assets, such as agricultural commodities, precious metals, currencies and many others. The contract themselves, (eg, futures contracts), state the terms of future transaction: price to be paid and time for the delivery of assets. In contrast with physical and deliverable assets, market indices are the products of mathematical procedures applied to market data. Hence, index-based derivatives are contracts written for ‘strange assets’, assets that do not have straightforward physical characteristics, and therefore cannot be delivered, upon buying and selling, in a similar manner to physical assets. This fact raises an interesting historical and sociological question: how did it happen that these abstract mathematical entities became the basis for the most popular financial contract of our time? More specifically, how did the non-physical and non-deliverable nature of market indices change in such a way that allowed indices to serve as a basis for the popular derivative contract we know today? This is the question that this chapter discusses. Economic sociology has paid little attention so far to the evolution of indexbased contracts. Several sociologists refer to the role that index-based contracts

Making Education Count: The Effects of Ethnicity and Qualifications on Intergenerational Social Class Mobility:

Abstract: This paper examines the role of social class and ethnic group background in determining individuals' social class destinations It explores the extent to which these background factors are mediated by educational achievement, and the role of educational qualifications in enabling intergenerational class mobility To do this, it uses the ONS Longitudinal Study These data allow us to observe parents' characteristics during childhood for a group of children of different ethnic groups growing up in England and Wales in the same period and who had reached adulthood by 2001 Results show that the influence of class background on these children's subsequent social class position varied with ethnicity: it was important for the majority, even after taking account of educational qualifications, but had a much smaller role to play for the minority groups The minority groups made use of education to achieve upward mobility, but to greater effect for some groups than for others Among those without educational qualifications, minority groups suffered an ‘ethnic penalty’ in relation to higher class outcomes; but for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, this penalty persisted at all levels of education These findings challenge the notion that a more equal society can be achieved simply through promoting equality of opportunity through education

Sociological discourse of the relational: the cases of Bourdieu & Latour

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu's approach to sociology has been so widely recognized as being innovative that his innovations can be said to have been academically incorporated to the degree of having-been-innova...

Same sex couples and marriage: negotiating relational landscapes with families and friends

Abstract: Focusing on the decision to enter into a marriage and/or to conduct a commitment ceremony, this paper explores how same-sex couples negotiate their relationships with both family and friends at the point at which they make decisions about who to invite to their ceremony. The ceremony is argued to be a ‘fateful moment’ at which point lesbians and gay men necessarily take stock of relationships which are meaningful to them. It is argued that the data from the qualitative interviews on which this paper is based add to the on-going debates about the meaning and significance of both (given) families and (chosen) friends for same-sex couples and suggests that it is sociologically important to recognise both the blurring of the boundaries between these categories as well as the meanings that individuals themselves bring to an understanding of the significance of these relationships.