Sociology

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003001pmid: N/A

Crompton, Rosemary; Le Feuvre, Nicky

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003002pmid: N/A

Equality with men in the world of paid work has been a major feminist objective. Given that work in the `public' sphere has historically been shaped on the assumption that the `worker' will be male, then national employment systems which facilitate masculine employment patterns (i.e. full-time work and unbroken employment careers) might be expected to be more likely to generate gender equality. This paper compares women's employment in France (where `masculine' careers for women are common) and Britain (where part-time work and broken employment careers are more likely) at the macro, meso (occupational), and micro (individual) levels. The two occupations studied are finance and pharmacy. The evidence presented suggests that there are considerable similarities between women in the two countries at the occupational and individual level, despite national variations. In the light of this evidence, structural and individual explanations of women's employment behaviour are examined, and the continuing significance of structural constraint on the patterning of gender relations is emphasised.

Gabe, Jonathan; Bury, Michael

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003003pmid: N/A

This paper offers an analysis of the events surrounding the suspension of the licence for the widely used sleeping tablet Halcion (triazolam) by the British Licensing Authority in October 1991. It is argued that these events highlight a growing crisis in modern medical treatments and in the social relations of health care. This is illustrated by focusing on four elements which have contributed to Halcion becoming a public issue and to its suspension and subsequent banning, namely the claims-making activities of medical experts, the development of legal challenges to medicine, the role of the media and the response of the state.

Scott, Jacqueline; Alwin, Duane F.; Braun, Michael

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003004pmid: N/A

This paper compares the nature and extent of change in gender-role attitudes in Britain with other nations. We hypothesise that while many of the changes would be similar across nations reflecting, in part, the increased importance of women's labour-force participation, the pace and sources of attitudinal change would be different in the different nations. Comparisons are made over the last decade between Britain, the United States and Germany. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) additional comparisons over a shorter time period are made with Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy. Data from the General Social Surveys of America (GSS) and Germany (ALLBUS) reveal that there has been a marked liberal shift in attitudes, with more of the change occurring within cohorts than through the process of cohort succession. In Britain, data from the British Social Attitudes surveys (BSA) reveal a slower and less consistent pace of change, with evidence of a growing gender difference in beliefs that maternal employment may be harmful to children.

Valverde, Mariana

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003005pmid: N/A

This paper examines the widely used two-way metaphor of the `jungle' in its back-and-forth movement between imperial travel writing of the late Victorian period and early urban sociology and social reform. The analysis has two aspects: first, technologies of knowledge production such as mapping are shown to provide a common epistemological base for imperial and urban knowledges, secondly, the imagery of `the jungle' is analysed. It is shown that the images produced in the writings of explorers such as Henry Stanley relied at least to some extent on analogies to everyday problems of urban poverty and overcrowding, as well as, more implicitly, on European masculine sexual fears about reproduction, growth and decay. This particular image of `the African jungle' was then re-imported into the discourse of urban social poverty and vice, most memorably in the Salvation Army's In Darkest England and the Way Out. The process analysed in this paper is not a unique discursive dynamic, it is argued, but is rather an instance of a common manoeuvre of cultural hegemony that can be called `the dialectic of the familiar and the unfamiliar'.

Jones, Bryn

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003006pmid: N/A

Active participation in political parties is an important condition for the functioning of political democracy. On the political Left, however, the role of the party activist is under pressure from both internal and external changes in the political culture. Catching up with continental European socialist parties, the leadership of the British Labour Party has progressively changed policy priorities and now its socialist ideology. Externally, `new social movements' are said to be promoting new political aims and new forms of activism. A case-study of the influence of these factors on the commitment and participation of members, and ex-members, of a typical southern constituency Labour Party suggests that `new social movements' do not constitute a rival attraction to these members, ex-members, and activists. Their commitment is, however, being reduced by personal economic and social pressures and their dissonant adherence to traditional values of British socialism. To the extent that political involvement depends on motivation by values or ideological principles this study suggests a decline in party political activism, and a possible obstacle to a `grass roots' recovery by Labour in Southern England.

Watt, Paul

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003007pmid: N/A

This paper examines the extent to which housing tenure constitutes an enduring aspect of social inequality in relation to theories of re-stratification and the supposed decline of social class divisions. It uses an analysis of housing mobility based upon a survey of council tenants carried out in the inner London Borough of Camden and it looks at the housing tenure destinations of the tenants' adult `children' who have left the parental home. The largest tenure of destination was owner occupation, whilst just over a third of the `children' were local authority or housing association tenants. This indicates that an inter-generational, social renting `underclass' has not so far developed, contrary to the re-stratification theories. However, a higher proportion of the younger than the older `children' were tenants of social rented housing. The relative impact of class and household employment patterns on housing mobility is considered. The paper concludes by arguing that social class is of continued importance in terms of understanding patterns of housing mobility.

Furlong, Andy; Biggart, Andy; Cartmel, Fred

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003008pmid: N/A

In this paper we use evidence from the Scottish Young People's Surveys to explore some of the ways in which local contexts help to shape young people's subjective orientations towards the labour market. We attempt to move beyond the concept of `opportunity structures' introduced by Roberts by considering the salience of a number of possible components of these structures of opportunity. We argue that young people's occupational aspirations are shaped as part of an interplay between individual inequalities and opportunity contexts and we provide evidence to challenge earlier research which cast doubt on the importance of local contexts. Our research suggests that neighbourhoods have an important impact on male occupational aspirations but that contextual effects have a weaker effect on females.

Scambler, Graham

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003009pmid: N/A

This paper is premised on the view that it is premature to write about the end of modernity. Moreover it is argued that, for all the flaws of early Enlightenment philosophy, what Jurgen Habermas has termed the `project of modernity' should be seen as incomplete, rather than abandoned. Drawing more generally on Habermas' theories, five metatheoretical theses are outlined and elaborated. These, it is suggested, might set the parameters for a fin-de-siècle sociology, geared above all to the rationalisation of the lifeworld, which is both credible and critical in orientation.

Bechhofer, Frank

doi: 10.1177/0038038596030003010pmid: N/A

To provoke debate, the paper, after fifteen years, repeats and expands on an analysis of the use of empirical data and the role of quantification in articles published in some major British journals of sociology. The earlier paper argued that the training of undergraduates, and the influence and example of their teachers, tends to orient them, well before graduate education begins, towards particular kinds of research topic and, where empirical data are used, approaches employing no quantification or very simple techniques. It suggested this would be a selfreinforcing process unless there were far-reaching changes in undergraduate curricula which were unlikely to come about. It predicted that the divide between these aspects of British sociology and that practised in North America and many parts of Europe would widen further. British sociology has become somewhat more empirical over the past fifteen years, with the bulk of this expansion in the qualitative area. The more sophisticated quantitative approaches are not much more in evidence than before. This raises a number of questions which should be a matter of debate. It is worrying that the debate does not seem to be taking place.