This paper seeks to explore sociology as an imaginative pursuit. After a brief reconsideration of Mills's notion of 'the sociological imagination' I examine three areas illustrating the various imaginations within the discipline: the work of Robert K. Merton; ethnomethodology; and the diversities of feminist scholarship. Two particular case studies are explored: the sociology of the body and the use of autobiographical studies in sociology. I conclude with some suggestions for the encouragement of imaginative thought within the discipline.

This paper draws on empirical research into the recruitment, training, and management of female flight attendants, working primarily in the transatlantic business travel sector of the contemporary airline industry. We argue that whilst the ‘ skills’ which flight attendants are required to deploy are denied, being treated as somehow inherent abilities and thus neither trained nor remunerated, they are nevertheless managed in a directive way. This management involves, in particular, a focus on a flight attendant’s figure, and ‘dieting’ – what Naomi Wolf has referred to as ‘the essence of contemporary femininity’ (Wolf 1990:200) – as a recruitment, training and managerial strategy. The work of a female flight attendant involves adhering to culturally prescribed norms on femininity as well as organisational regulations governing her figure – its presentation and performance – whilst undertaking work which involves, at least in part, serving food to others. We conclude that this aspect of the work of flight attendants is thus ‘a symbolic representation of the subordination of women . . . a concrete expression of their position as servers and carers of men’ (Charles and Kerr 19 88:84).

The workplace has been extensively and variously evaluated as an environment which – like others – contains risks to health. This paper unpacks such risk assessment by problematising the relation between hazards and risks. Three positions are set out. In the first (materialist or realist), risks map directly onto underlying real hazards. In the second (constructionist or culturalist), hazards are natural, while risks are social constructions. In the final (postmodern) position, both risks and hazards are seen as constructions. The paper goes on to consider the implications of the latter position for assessment of risks in the workplace, arguing that risks are often discounted in the on-going choices made by people who do some things called ‘work’ and evaluate their continuity of sense-of-self as their ‘health’.

This paper questions recent attempts by feminists to move theory beyond patriarchy, addressing the charge by Pollert that the concept of patriarchy impoverishes analysis of gender and class. In place of patriarchy, the author advocates an alternative feminist historical materialist analysis of hegemonic practices as the means for excavating gender and class from lived experience. This mode of historical materialist theorising rejects the concept of patriarchy as unnecessarily abstract and unable to advance knowledge about the construction of gender in practice. A theory of practice can make sense of the mess of everyday life, and focus research on gendered bodies, spaces and experiences.

In this paper we explore some key antionomies which have emerged in relation to children and childhood in late modernity: tensions between autonomy and protection and between perceptions of children as ‘at risk’ and as potentially threatening. A particular focus here is on the sexualisation of risk, the degree of public concern expressed whenever the sexual ‘innocence’ of children is thought to be endangered. We argue that the concept of risk anxiety provides a useful means of analysing contemporary fears about children and childhood and may thus be understood as contributing to the ongoing social construction of childhood. Here risk anxiety must be located within the context of gendered and generational power relations, in which children’s lives are bounded by adult surveillance. Furthermore, risk anxiety may have material consequences for children’s daily lives and for everyday adult–child negotiations around safety and danger, protection and autonomy.

The paper argues that the class legacy has had profoundly negative consequences for accounts of material gender inequality, and that even where gender theorists have attempted to move beyond class, they have been hampered by the fragments of class theory. It will be argued that whilst gender has posed a fundamental challenge to class analysis, the reconstructions which have been attempted have not escaped the central assumptions of class theory. The weakness of such reconstructions – hindered by flaws inherited from both the Marxian and neo-Weberian traditions of class analysis – has led some post-modern writers to question the very idea of a determinate, structural account of gender. At the time of writing, deconstruction – rather than reconstruction – is in the ascendent. However, whilst a structural account of gender can and should be defended, past attempts show that this cannot be achieved by clinging to the assumptions of class analysis, or by developing additive ‘class-plus-gender’ explanations. Only those approaches which reject the economistic assumptions of class, by placing emphasis on the social space as a differentiated and determinate social whole, can overcome the limitations of current accounts of gender.

In a recent article in Sociology, Mouzelis argues that Lockwood’s distinction between system integration and social integration is, with some modifications, still to be retained because of its logical coherence and its methodological virtues . While its basic value is recognised, this article reconsiders the distinction in the light of some recent achievements in social theory. It is argued that the distinction does not merely offer two different perspectives on society but that, in the actual social world, both dimensions are intertwined in a number of ways. In particular, reflexive actors can draw the distinction themselves which raises questions about the objective status of ‘incompatibilities’. The implications are developed through some reflections on the nature of social processes as well as the role of institutions, strategic action and conflicts. On the one hand, it is shown that system integration is an important objective for social agency, since many actions are aimed at controlling the performance of processes. On the other, social integration has a decisive impact on those processes because conflict and co-operation transform the institutional preconditions those processes are based upon. The social–system integration distinction offers therefore interesting insights into how social actors themselves attempt to cope with their worlds. Apart from being a methodological tool, the distinction expresses a substantial characteristic of society.

This paper examines the character of the debate about ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ methods in feminist social science. The ‘paradigm argument’ has been central to feminist social science methodology; the feminist case against ‘malestream’ methods and in favour of qualitative methods has paralleled other methodological arguments within social science against the unthinking adoption by social science of a natural science model of inquiry. The paper argues in favour of rehabilitating quantitative methods and integrating a range of methods in the task of creating an emancipatory social science. It draws on the history of social and natural science, suggesting that a social and historical understanding of ways of knowing gives us the problem not of gender and methodology, but of the gendering of methodology as itself a social construction.

This paper outlines and evaluates recent contributions by Nicos Mouzelis and Margaret Archer to the structure–agency debate. Mouzelis offers an internal reconstruction of Giddens’s structuration theory; Archer an external alternative. I show that, although representing an advance on Giddens’s position, Mouzelis’s account fails because he relies on the former’s definition of structure as comprising rules and resources. I then examine Archer’s solution to the problem. I argue that her definition of activity-dependence makes her account of the relationship between agents and structures unclear. I outline an alternative account in terms of supervenience, and argue that it contains the minimum ontological claim necessary for a realist understanding of the structure–agent relationship.

The usefulness of archived qualitative data has been questioned where contextual information surrounding the conditions of its production is not provided. It has been assumed that, without this background information, the data remain incomplete. By the same token, it has been argued that the provision of such information will repair and complete the dataset for the purpose of generating new findings or theories. We suggest that these arguments stress practical solutions to what is in fact a more fundamental epistemological issue relating to the reflexive and interpretive nature of the research paradigm within which we, as qualitative researchers, reside. Our experiences of revisiting our own data, discussed in this paper, have highlighted the central part played by the researcher not only in the interpretation and theorising of data, but also in their construction. Because of this, we contend that the conditions under which data are produced are inescapable, thus rendering their re-interpretation at some later date problematic. Thus, we argue that, while ‘reflexivity’ is now recognised as a key feature of qualitative research across social science disciplines, the implications of this for the archiving and re-use of qualitative data have yet to be adequately addressed. Failure to acknowledge this epistemological issue leads researchers unwittingly to adopt a ‘naively realist’ position.

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the everyday among social theorists from Habermas and Giddens to de Certeau and Maffesoli. Taking Habermas as a benchmark, it is argued that recent accounts of the everyday in divergent traditions of analysis converge on two suspect theses: that of the everyday as ‘taken-for-granted’ and that of the everyday as ‘living history’. These two theses are related to Minotaur-like concepts of the everyday that are hybrids of ‘form’ and ‘substance’. It is suggested that three myths – of unity, life and resistance – give life to the Minotaur of the everyday. The Minotaur of the everyday thus carries a great weight of theoretical baggage and its monstrosity serves, paradoxically, to preserve the homogeneity and purity of the social domain. It is argued that the mythologies of the everyday can be dissolved if a more far-reaching and monstrous heterogeneity is allowed to the social (or socio-technical) world.

Taking as its starting point the ‘irrational passion for dispassionate rationality’, so prevalent in Western thought and practice, this paper traces, through the emotions, current debates surrounding the ambivalent nature of modernity as both order and chaos, conformity and transgression. Reason and emotions are not, it is argued, antithetical to one another, rather there is a need to fundamentally rethink existing epistemological models and ontological ways of being and knowing. These issues are traced, on the one hand, through the increasing rationalisation of Western society, the latest expression of which, it is claimed, is a new form of ‘postemotionalism’, and, on the other hand, through the resurgence of more Dionysian values and collective forms of effervescence. The paper concludes with a critical assessment of these contradictory features and the corporeal dilemmas which underpin them, speculating on the ‘fate’ of emotions at the turn of the century in the light of current postmodern theorising.

Cultural trends shape the experience of marriage by forming expectations, entitlements and obligations. The self-development discourse generated by the therapeutic culture has been suggested as playing a part in such shaping. This paper examines how this particular discourse affects the way women experience their marital conversations and, more specifically, the extent to which they feel able to initiate change-directed negotiation within them. Twenty-eight professional women in England, selected to reflect different occupational exposures to the self-development discourse, were interviewed in order to examine their experiences of the marital conversation and possible changes within it. The analysis shows that specific feeling rules limit the possibility of women’s concerns entering the marital conversation, and that the self-development discourse can introduce alternative feeling rules with the potential to overcome such limitations. It is shown that women who are influenced by the ideological messages equating change with relationship improvement contained within this discourse are able to adopt its proposed feeling rules and to use them to introduce negotiation into their marital conversations. These women are able to use this increased negotiability within the marital conversation to become more powerful in shaping their marital experiences.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) results from cerebral damage caused by a blow to the head, for example in a road traffic accident. The frequency of TBI means that it has been characterised as the silent epidemic of modern times. The majority of those who are head-injured are young men. This paper argues that the social reaction to head injury is testament to the latent eugenicist and mentalist suppositions within modernity. The brain-damaged person cannot readily overcome disability with the assistance of the technological aids available to those whose handicapping condition is physical. The consequences that head injury has for the mind and for the ‘self’ entail the special sequestration of those who are head-injured from modernity’s concerns with reflexivity and with the paramount cultural and material importance of the mind, whatever is said about the sociological significance of ‘body matters’. Because TBI brings in its wake the liminality of being ‘neither here nor there’, of young men who become once again ‘children’, the implications for family dynamics are both distinctive and profound. The ‘future’, around which much of modernity revolves, is denied to those whose catastrophe arose from these same modern times.

This paper evaluates the use of the concept of ‘diaspora’ as an alternative way of thinking about transnational migration and ethnic relations to those ways that rely on ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. It examines the heuristic potential of the concept, as a descriptive typological tool and as a social condition and societal process. Both approaches are described and key elements within each are assessed. It is argued that although very different in emphasis, and though containing different strengths and weaknesses, both approaches are problematised by their reliance on a notion of deterritorialised ethnicity which references the primordial bonds of ‘homeland’. It is also argued that both approaches are unable to attend fully to ‘intersectionality’, that is to issues of class, gender and trans-ethnic alliances. It is concluded that although potentially enabling a broader sweep of questions that can relate to the transnational aspects of population movements and settlement, the concept of ‘diaspora’, as it has been articulated so far, does not overcome fully some of the problems identified with the ‘ethnicity’ problematic.

This paper provides a content analysis of 1094 dating advertisements. It seeks, in part, to test results of previous research emanating mainly from the disciplines of psychology and sociobiology, which shows that men offer financial and occupational attributes and seek physical attractiveness in partners whereas women offer physical attractiveness and seek resource and status attributes, consistent with traditional ‘sex-role’ stereotypes and mating selection strategies. Locating analyses in the context of a postmodern, consumer society, it shows that lifestyle choices have superseded resources as primary identity markers for men, that women market their ‘masculine’ attributes and seek ‘feminine’ men; and that the body is central to identity for both men and women. It concludes therefore that traditional gendered stereotypes may now be changing as men and women deal with a context of a novel set of social conditions.

In this paper I examine changes in men and women’s attitudes to sexual morality across nations and time. First, I use time-series data from British Social Attitudes and the General Social Survey of the United States to examine to what extent there has been a revolution in sexual attitudes and whether the change in attitudes has continued through to the 1990s. In particular, I investigate whether changes in permissiveness are mainly due to period effects or to cohort replacement. I also compare the trajectory and pace of change in the two countries. Second, I use data from the International Social Survey Programme to compare British and American attitudes with those of four other nations with very different socio-political and religious traditions – Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Poland. With the exception of attitudes to pre-marital sex, attitudes have not changed very dramatically over the past few decades. Attitudes towards homosexuality are becoming slowly more tolerant, especially among women, but condemnation of extra-marital sex has remained high. Religion plays an important role in explaining both within and cross-national variations in attitudes and provides a powerful counterbalance to permissive trends. I conclude that change has not been as revolutionary as is often claimed and the demise of traditional values is over-stated.

This paper draws upon an ongoing study into gambling in the United Kingdom to examine off-course betting as a form of social life. Through such an approach it identifies several features of betting shop life that complement and refine the research literature to date: the different sub-groups within the off-course betting population; how they manage their activities in terms of their finances and their domestic and work responsibilities; the often subtle social dynamics of the betting shop. Through an analysis of these features of the punter’s world, the paper investigates the rationality of the activities of loss-making punters, and shows how this differs markedly from the rationalities employed by those who win at the game – bookmakers and professional gamblers. One common concern for many punters is the dream of the ‘big win’ for a little stake – a concern not shared by the other two groups – a dream that undermines their ability to win, and thus compounds their losses. The paper then identifies the different sub-groups involved in off-course betting, and discusses the different times at which they bet and the different strategies they use. In such a way the paper contributes to the debate through identifying groups and social processes not addressed in the literature, and shows how they refine the categories and concepts used to date.

G. Marshall, A. Swift and S. Roberts, Against the Odds: Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, £40.00, paperback £14.99, xiii+265pp. ISBN 0-19-829239-2 pbk and 0-19-829240-6 hbk.

F. Devine, Social Class in America and Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, £16.95 pbk, xi+303 pp. ISBN 0-7486-0666-1.

P. Mahony and C. Zmroczek (eds.), Class Matters: 'Working Class' Women's Perspectives on Social Class. London: Taylor and Francis, 1997, £39.000, paperback £12.95, 210 pp. ISBN 0-7484-0541-0 pbk and ISBN 0-7484-0540-2 hbk.

In his account of Thatcherism as a hegemonic project, Stuart Hall points out that discourse theory provides insight both into the ways in which Thatcherism was constructed as a discourse from a combination of disparate ideological strands and into the ways in which this discourse was engaged in a hegemonic project. However, discourse analysis has rarely been applied in empirical study of the spread of the ideas and values of Thatcherism. The findings of attitude surveys indicate the failure of Thatcherism to produce radical social and cultural change. This paper presents textually oriented discourse analysis as an alternative way of understanding the spread of Thatcherism to that of attitude surveys. Research applying the approach demonstrates the continuing use of elements of Thatcherite discourse across the Conservative party and Labour party and hence the lasting impact of Thatcherism in spite of its failure to become hegemonic.