British Sociology Research Articles

Education for Freedom? “Living Room Learning” and the Liberal Arts of Government

This article provokes critical reflection about the role of adult educators in contemporary processes of social control. It does so through presenting an empirical case study of an important liberal adult education program (Living Room Learning) and through introducing the work of British sociologist, Nikolas Rose. Rose’s provocative ideas about the evolution of power and oppression, and his seemingly paradoxical conceptualization of freedom as a strategy and technique of government, have influenced diverse fields of scholarly activity. This article contributes both to the history of adult education in North America and to the understanding of the contemporary place of adult education within the liberal arts of government. It raises important questions regarding the relationship between adult education, power, and social control, and it encourages scholars of adult education to examine their field more critically.

Images of an impossible event

The text puts into focus the changing nature, dramatic actuality and expanded (bio-ethical) meaning of the suicidal phenomenon as a global cultural and media symptom of the first decade of the 21st century. Starting from radical examples of a suicidal protest as a political deathritual (the nature of which is here conceived by victims' struggle for freedom, respect of human rights and emancipation of the oppressed working-class people), the analysis is supported by theoretical backgrounds among which the most remarkable place has been reserved for a study about the history of self-immolation by the British sociologist Michael Biggs. The text attempts to open up new fields of interpretation bordering the phenomenon of the image, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of suicide, on the other, in the context of contemporary everyday life and media culture under the globalization regime. One of the main goals, towards which this re-articulation of suicide as an ultimate cultural symptom of our times has developed, resides in the need to re-examine the complicity between the iconography of death (as a consequence of the radical self-destructive ritual) and the new imaginary of the 'political'.

Dealing with Domestic Films: Methodological Strategies and Pitfalls in Studies of Home Movies from the Predigital Era

Dealing with Domestic Films:Methodological Strategies and Pitfalls in Studies of Home Movies from the Predigital Era Cecilia Mörner (bio) Home movies and other amateur film forms have become objects of interest in recent times, not only for historians and anthropologists but also for film scholars. There are good reasons for this. Whereas historians typically use such films to verify and explain the existence of certain phenomena in the past, and anthropologists understand different aspects of human interaction through home movie collections, film scholars tend to explore private practices of visual technologies and to explain home movies as part of a domestic visual culture that is distinct from commercial media. Home movies made prior to the video revolution of the 1980s are different from any other film form. Despite their relatively poor technical and aesthetic quality compared to professionally made films, home movies offer a unique way of understanding [End Page 23] domestic visual culture from the past. Like today's digital DIY films exhibited on YouTube and other websites, home movies convey valuable information about private history as well as about such things as national or state iconography as well as consumer technology. 1 However, most home movies from the predigital era were intended to be watched domestically. 2 Consequently, they either addressed people who had experienced the films' subjects and events in real life and were able to fill in possible textual gaps, or they were shown with oral commentaries (e.g., by the filmmaker) that could explain and contextualize the events in the films. In most cases, at least one of these two methods was necessary because most predigital home movies are fragmented and hard to make sense of for a viewer outside these circumstances. As a result, the study of home movies often involves dealing with films that are difficult to analyze textually. In her 1999 book Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, American filmmaker Michelle Citron analyzed her own family's personal memories and narratives. Citron used her family's home movies and her own documentary films to trace memories of child abuse and a problematic relationship with her mother. She adopted theoretical perspectives on themes such as power, authenticity, and memory and also used close readings and oral testimonies of family members. Even though the analyses of the oral testimonies were not made in the systematic way stipulated by traditional ethnographic methods, Citron's study demonstrated the value of combining textual analyses and interviews. 3 The present article aims to suggest that ethnographic methods, in particular, interviews, can compensate for the lack of both textual analysis and contextual analysis in studies of home movies, even when the purpose is to study the films themselves rather than their reception. Only a few studies of home movies published in the last two or three years include ethnographic methods. For example, most of the researchers in the 2009 British anthology Movies on Home Ground relied on a combination of textual and contextual analysis, 4 and only two out of twenty-seven articles in Mining the Home Movies: Excavations in Histories and Memories, an American anthology published in 2008, included interviews. 5 The 2010 Spanish anthology La casa abierta: El cine doméstico y sus reciclajes contemporáneos, which in part dealt with home movies, utilized no ethnographic methods at all. 6 There are, of course, several examples of ethnographic methods in studies of film forms other than home movies. Annette Kuhn's British ethnohistorical study from 2002, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, reconstructs 1930s cinema culture in Great Britain by combining analyses of informants' oral histories with analyses of other more conventional sources. Other examples of moviegoing history [End Page 24] include Australian Nancy Huggett's 2002 thesis "A Cultural History of Cinema-going in the Illawarra (1900-50)," which explored processes of meaning making through oral history narratives; the ongoing History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception (HOMER) project, which started in 2004; a 2006 study, Sociology Goes to the Movies, in which British sociologist Rajinder Kumar Dudrah combined textual analyses of films with analyses of participant observations and extended interviews; and "Cinema, Memory, and Place-Related Identities: Remembering Cinema-going in the Post...

Aux origines de la sociologie anglaise : le débat économique et social sur la pauvreté à l'orée du xxe siècle

Résumé Cet article met en lumière l’apport des sociologues dans les débats relatifs à la pauvreté en Angleterre au tournant du xx e siècle et, accessoirement, le rôle de ces débats dans l’affirmation de la sociologie sur la scène politique, puis académique. Il montre que si la sociologie est encore une science embryonnaire à l’époque, elle tend à se distinguer de l’économie politique s’agissant de l’analyse de la « question sociale ». C’est elle, en effet, qui révèle l’existence d’une importante pauvreté industrielle, qui mesure l’étendue du phénomène grâce au procédé de la « ligne de pauvreté » et qui s’efforce, surtout, de proposer une alternative convaincante à l’individualisme libéral et au socialisme. En examinant plus particulièrement les travaux de Seebohm Rowntree, John Hobson ou Leonard Hobhouse, cet article souligne finalement ce qui fait la spécificité de la sociologie anglaise : sa contribution essentielle à l’élucidation des problèmes de pauvreté.

Child Domestic Labor in Accra: Opportunity and Empowerment or Perpetuation of Gender Inequality?

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 14 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 163 CHILD DOMESTIC LABOR IN ACCRA: OPPORTUNITY AND EMPOWERMENT OR PERPETUATION OF GENDER INEQUALITY?1 PEACE MAMLE TETTEH Introduction Child labor is a relatively dynamic phenomenon, varying in its extent, nature , and effects in different countries or even within the same country over a period of time. As a result of this, the exact estimates, effects, and knowledge on measures to tackle child labor have proved rather elusive. One identified challenge in tackling of global child labor is the unavailability and/or paucity of current, comprehensive, and disaggregated data on the subject. This is not totally surprising because researching domestic labor is particularly challenging because of its “hidden,” “invisible,” and “inaccessible ” nature. The cultural notions of childhood and children’s work have produced attitudes and misconceptions that have acted as a hindrance to researching and tackling child (domestic) labor. A common attitude of recruiters, employers, and officials working on behalf of children is to deny that child domestic work is a form of child labor or employment at all; or to refuse to acknowledge that it is detrimental to the wellbeing of the children concerned. Thus, child domestic workers have become culturally accepted and are largely relied on in many households. Engaging children 1. I would like to thank the many child domestics I interviewed for this study and the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Ghana Studies for their comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Sociological Association (BSA) Youth Conference, University of Surrey, United Kingdom, in July 2010. 164 Ghana Studies • volume 14 • 2012 as domestics in a household is considered safe, indeed important for the child’s development and hence it is not stigmatized. This article on child domestic labor in Accra seeks to “(re)-search” the nature and realities of child domestic workers and contrast it with the notions and perceptions held about it. The article addresses four specific questions namely: Who are child domestic workers? What prospect does domestic work hold for children? What is the nexus between child domestic labor and gender inequality, discrimination, and female poverty? And, what policy measures are required to tackle the engagement of girls in domestic labor? Who Are Child Domestic Workers? The jury is still out on a specific definition of child labor and indeed of child domestic labor. What is considered domestic work varies from country to country. Whether children biologically or socially related to their employers can be considered domestic workers is still being debated. Thus, the definition given a child domestic worker reflects the way a household operates , considerations of a child’s role, and the way paid and unpaid work is defined (Hagemann et al. 2006). Definitions of who these children are have been made with regard to their age, relationship to their employers, the kinds of tasks they perform in the homes of their employers, and their remuneration (Hagemann et al. 2006). “Child labor” as used in this article refers to “all economic activities carried out by persons between the ages of five and seventeen which have the potential to interfere with their school work, i.e. depriving them of the opportunity to attend school, obliging them to leave school prematurely or requiring them to combine school attendance with excessively long hours of work (more than four hours a day) and heavy and strenuous workinjurious to their health or development” (Hilowitz et al. 2004: 16). The International Labor Organization considers “domestic labor” to be work done by children in the home of a third party or employer under Tetteh • Child Domestic Labor in Accra 165 exploitative conditions. Where exploitation is extreme, and the work is hazardous or conditions are akin to slavery, it is seen as the “worst” form of child labor. The position of children employed by third parties in non-­ exploitative conditions seems inconclusive. However, where a child “helps about the house” performing light tasks in his or her home, the work undertaken is not considered “labor” but viewed as part of the socialization process of children. In this regard, child domestic workers...

Når mor eller far svikter – om tillit og tillitsrelasjoner i to norske ungdomsromaner

The aim of this article is to examine how relations of trust between parent and youngster are expressed in two Norwegian novels written for teenage audiences, namely Tidleg på våren (“Early in Spring”) by Halldis Moren Vesaas (1949) and Bittet (“The Bite”) by Hilde Hagerup (2007). Using the theories of the Danish theologian and moral philosopher Knud E. Løgstrup and the English sociologist Anthony Giddens, two analytic categories of trust and trust relations are established: spontaneous trust, which expresses a fundamental trustthat is not concerned with utility values or risk, and reflexive trust, which takes into consideration utility and risk. An analysis of the novels based on these two categories shows that in both books trust relations between parent and child are seen as fundamental for human existence, much in accordance with the way they are presented in the works of Knud E. Løgstrup.Keywords: trust, trust relation, Knud E. Løgstrup, Anthony Giddens, Halldis Moren Vesaas, Hilde Hagerup, Harald Rosenløw Eeg, Holly- Jane Rahlens, Tidleg på våren, Bittet, Yatzy, Prins William, Maximilian Minsky and me

Teorias das práticas na análise do consumo

The article offers a presentation of the contributions of the British sociologist Alan Warde on theories of practice, emphasizing the analyses that seek to understand the phenomena of consumption in the contemporary societies. In this sense, it discusses the central ideas related to the concept of practice and its implications for the analysis of the sphere of consumption. Furthermore, it adds some approaches that aim to provide a theoretical basis relevant to an emerging sociology of consumption. Key words: practice, consumption, performance, nexus.

Teorias das Práticas na Análise do Consumo

The article offers a presentation of the contributions of the British sociologist Alan Warde on theories of practice, emphasizing the analyses that seek to understand the phenomena of consumption in the contemporary societies. In this sense, it discusses the central ideas related to the concept of practice and its implications for the analysis of the sphere of consumption. Furthermore, it adds some approaches that aim to provide a theoretical basis relevant to an emerging sociology of consumption.Key words: practice, consumption, performance, nexus.

Sociological knowledge and colonial power in Bombay around the First World War

By the turn of the twentieth century a distinct 'social domain'--along with its constituent parts, problems and internal dynamics-was turned into a political entity, and a concern for state bureaucracies existed across the industrializing world. Specific motivations for this trend may have varied from location to location, but included arguments for higher industrial productivity and less political discontent, often intertwined with a humanitarian impulse in calls for better housing, expanded public health or improved working conditions. As has been well documented, the politicization of the social domain in early twentieth-century Britain owes much to the consolidation of British sociology as a distinct discipline. Yet while the link between the rise of social politics and sociology has been established with regard to Britain, little has been said about the occurrence of this coupling elsewhere in the twentieth-century British Empire. This article aims to rectify that omission by showing the interplay between newly raised social concerns of the colonial administration in the Bombay Presidency, Western British India, and the establishing of sociological research within the borders of the Presidency around the time of the First World War. The article will explore how the colonial administration in Bombay planned to meet new demands for sociological knowledge in colonial state policy, how sociology was subsequently introduced into the Presidency as a research subject, and how new sociological methods were applied in actual colonial government.

Sugar Pigs: Children’s Consumption of Confectionery

Sugar Pigs: Children’s Consumption of Confectionery

Narrating Darwinian Inheritances: Fields, Life Stories and the Literature-Science Relation

This paper will revisit Gillian Beer’s capacious and extraordinarily rich work on narrative in Darwin’s evolutionary theory in order to consider how it continues to stimulate new work on the place of narrative in the science/literature relation. The paper will look at new scholarship on life writing in the history of science (by, for instance Thomas Soderqvist), and will go on to play close attention to the contested place of life writing and biographical narration in the elaboration of evolutionary theory in the ‘host field’ of nascent British Sociology as Darwin’s legacy and authority was debated at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age. Edited by Christopher Deacy and Elisabeth Arweck.

This perceptive interdisciplinary approach to exploring our understanding of religion and the sacred through media and popular culture is the latest contribution from the Theology and Religion in Interdisciplinary Perspective series in conjunction with the British Sociological Association (BSA) Sociology of Religion Study Group. Christopher Deacy and Elisabeth Arweck have edited a volume of essays that emerged from a joint conference of the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group and the UK Research Network Group in Theology, Religion and Popular Culture which took place at St Catherine’s College, Oxford in April 2007. The essays selected for this text represent an expanding international and interdisciplinary approach to the academic exploration of religious studies and society and is the key strength of this work. Deacy begins with a thought-provoking introduction aptly entitled ‘Why Study Religion and Popular Culture?’ in which he discusses the importance of a text that approaches religious understanding in contemporary culture from a wide ‘range of disciplines including theology, religious studies, media studies, cultural studies, film studies, sociology and anthropology’ (p. 9). He points out that while many academics still debate the good or bad characteristics of one faith tradition over another, what scholars should be doing is attempting to define ‘what religion is (or might be) … rather than to impose one’s own prejudices and/or ignorance on to the agenda.’ (p. 8). The essays within this text certainly make the reader question what contemporary religious understanding is and how it is affected by various forms of media and popular culture. Fourteen essays examine a variety of issues; the most notable of which are discussed in greater detail.

Social theory: twenty introductory lectures

Introduction 1. What is theory? 2. The classical attempt at synthesis: Talcott Parsons 3. Parsons on the road to normativist functionalism 4. Parsons and the elaboration of normativist functionalism 5. Neo-utilitarianism 6. Interpretive approaches (1): symbolic interactionism 7. Interpretive approaches (2): ethnomethodology 8. Conflict sociology and conflict theory 9. Habermas and critical theory 10. Habermas' 'theory of communicative action' 11. Niklas Luhmann's radicalization of functionalism 12. Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration and the new British sociology of power 13. The renewal of Parsonianism and modernization theory 14. Structuralism and poststructuralism 15. Between structuralism and theory of practice: the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu 16. French anti-structuralists (Cornelius Castoriadis, Alain Touraine and Paul Ricoeur) 17. Feminist social theories 18. A crisis of modernity? New diagnoses (Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Bellah, and the debate between liberals and communitarians) 19. Neopragmatism 20. How things stand Bibliography.

Remembering Mike Rose

With Mike Rose's death, British economic sociology has lost one of its most knowledgeable and loveable characters. Mike had a mastery of the history and literature of the discipline that few could rival not only of Anglo-Saxon research but also of the French tradition of 'sociologie du travail'. He made an important personal contribution to the research literature through his writings over the decades on work values and attitudes. He had a wonderful sense of fun, a mordant wit and an amused and benevolent perspective on the rival intel lectual currents of the day. Trained in Cambridge as an economist and social anthropologist, his engagement with sociology started when he was recruited in 1962 by John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood as one of the main interviewers on the Affluent Worker project in the early 1960s the leading project in British indus trial sociology and social stratification of its day. Mike's skill at getting people to speak about their lives frequently led to the interviews stretching out for three hours or more, causing him to miss the last train back. (The project bud get had not anticipated the resulting toll in taxi fares!) He moved on to become the research officer of the project taking an active part in the discussions about the analysis and interpretation of the data. The experience of this research programme, with its advocacy of an 'action approach' in sociology and its emphasis upon the central importance of work orientations in understanding employees' reactions to their work experiences, forged a research agenda that was to lie at the heart of his work for the rest of his academic life. After leav ing Cambridge, he taught at the University of Salford (1965-8), before moving to his long-term home at the University of Bath, where he was to climb steadily up the ranks and continue as a very active researcher for years after his official retirement.

A More Generous and Respectful Agonism: Making Pluralization Safe for Democracy

The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition. Edited by David Campbell, Morton Schoolman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 364 pp., $34.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4270-0). This is a most interesting and provocative collection of essays touching on seminal aspects of William Connolly's prolific contributions to the pluralism debate and its implications for both political theory and international relations theory. As Campbell and Schoolman indicate, Connolly's “new pluralism” stands in contrast to its more conventional antecedents rooted in “American and British political science and sociology, especially after the Second World War.” These preceding conversations are summarized by Ferguson (2007), who charts pluralism's rise as an anti-Hegelian antidote to the centralizing tendencies of the state (James, Laski, Figgis, and Cole), and its formalist turn (Dahl and Truman), which stressed the state's role as a mediator between various competing domestic groups, through Arendt's efforts to revalidate contention and Berlin's “value incommensurability.” But in Ferguson's (2007:15) estimate all of these approaches to pluralism fell short of Jamesian pluralism whose hallmarks were its acceptance of “the profound and meaningful differences in the world's of different people.” In many regards Connolly's “new pluralism” may share some of James' more aspirational commitments, and such points of affinity might be well worth exploring. However, this volume's intent is to locate Connolly's work within and against the Tocquevillian ideal, which provides Connolly with the opening to rework pluralist theory along the identity/difference fault lines that serve to illuminate how a biased set of institutional commitments, and the value structures which sustain them, privilege certain groups over others. As Runciman (1997) observes, “the history of political pluralism is the history of a series of unsatisfactory solutions to a set of intractable problems.” Whereas more conventional discussions of pluralism focused on the problem of authority, this collection of essays shifts our attention to the twin-sided problem of “how we can be with others” (Campbell, p. 290) and “how to eliminate violence toward difference” (Schoolman, p. …

Peter Townsend, disability, Fabianism and self‐organisation – an enduring difficulty. An obituary

The death in June 2009 of the British sociologist Peter Townsend prompted a powerful outpouring of support for him and his public contribution, in both mainstream media obituaries and subsequent co...

Linguistic forms and educational policy: the influence of Basil Bernstein

Linguistic forms and educational policy: the influence of Basil Bernstein

Canon Formation in Late 20th-Century British Sociology

This article examines the ‘canonical’ status achieved in recent British sociology by four writers: Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. Along with other key thinkers of the later 20th century such as Foucault and Habermas, these four sociologists, from different geographical and theoretical bases, transformed the shape of British sociology and its relation to social theory.

Sobre corpo, reflexidade e poder: um diálogo entre Anthony Giddens e Michel Foucault

This article deals with the British sociologist Anthony Giddens’ critical assessments of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. We ask whether Giddens’ criticisms are appropriate, in light of the re-elaborations that Foucault himself carried out over the course of his trajectory and particularly in his latter years. For these purposes, we take the (in) capacity of individual action in relation to the (non)subjective processes which have taken place in modern society as a guideline for our reflections, adopting notions of subject and power to analyze the body’s place within these discourses. We conclude with an analysis of some common elements in both theorists’ theoretical perspectives, present despite the epistemological and political nuances that distinguish them. Keywords: subject, body, power, politics.

An Unknown Radical: Dennis Chapman and The Home and Social Status

ABSTRACTThis article reconsiders the largely unknown work of British sociologist Dennis Chapman. Focusing on Chapman's 1955 study The Home and Social Status, the article proposes that Chapman's research into the design and consumption of mid twentieth century British domesticity and housing anticipates many of the later interdisciplinary questions and concerns of design history and material culture studies. Through analysis of his questions and concerns, the article demonstrates the ways Chapman characterized design as an activity of both professional designers and householders alike, and in so doing, the ways in which his work argues for a more sophisticated and inclusive understanding of design. Situating Chapman at the forefront of interdisciplinary method and thinking, the article argues that his work successfully negotiates the boundaries of design production and design consumption in such a way that subsequent disciplines have not.