http://www.socresonline.org.uk Sociological Research Online: High quality applied sociology, focusing on theoretical, empirical and methodological discussions which engage with current political, cultural and intellectual topics and debates en-GB Copyright Sociological Research Online Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:55:46 +0000 socres@surrey.ac.uk (Ross Coomber and Gayle Letherby) http://www.epress.ac.uk/SRO/SRO_75x30.gif http://www.socresonline.org.uk nbreznau2112@gmail.com (Nate Breznau) Review http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/reviews/1.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/reviews/1.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:59:00 +0000 Review of: Welfare (Key Concepts Series) by Daly, Mary, reviewed by Nate Breznau rob.ford@manchester.ac.uk (Robert Ford, James Tilley and Anthony Heath) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/8.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/8.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:58:00 +0000 Robert Ford, James Tilley and Anthony Heath: We investigate the reasons why some people, and some countries, place greater or lesser emphasis on the idea that membership of a nation is tied to ancestry. We test the influence of two key factors - economic development and ethnic division. Economic development is strongly associated with support for the ancestry criterion of national membership. Those who are more economically secure, who grew up in wealthier nations, or live in a wealthier nation currently, are less likely to emphasise ancestry as an important factor in national identity. Those who have grown up since mass immigration to a country begun are also less likely to emphasise ancestry. However, we find no evidence that historical conditions are correlated with current national identity beliefs. t.a.shildrick@tees.ac.uk (Tracy Shildrick) Review http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/reviews/3.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/reviews/3.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:57:00 +0000 Review of: Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists by Dorling, Daniel, reviewed by Tracy Shildrick uptonandrew@hotmail.com (Andrew Upton) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/1.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/1.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:56:00 +0000 Andrew Upton: This article reflects upon the experience of conducting research into a UK-based, though internationally-renowned, animal rights group. The article firstly rationalizes the ethnographic research methodology used to approach Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Secondly, it describes the effect of unforeseen factors (from adverse media attention to ongoing criminal investigations) on the Author's ability to forge research relationships with informants within the movement, and how these challenges were overcome. Given the interdisciplinary focus of the project, this manuscript will be of interest to scholars wishing to investigate 'hard-to-reach' social groups, and particularly those who have written on reflexivity and power in research relationships. NAbbas@iis.ac.uk (Najam Abbas) Review http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/reviews/2.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/reviews/2.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:55:00 +0000 Review of: "Stretching" Exercises for Qualitative Researchers by Janesick, Valerie J., reviewed by Najam Abbas g.van.eijk@law.leidenuniv.nl (Gwen van Eijk) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/2.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/2.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:54:00 +0000 Gwen van Eijk: This article examines 'neighbouring' as the setting in which cross-category relations develop and symbolic boundaries are constructed. The study is based on thirty in-depth interviews with residents living in a multi-ethnic and a mono-ethnic neighbourhood in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The findings challenge the hoped-for outcomes of social mixing in neighbourhoods, as well as the view that boundary making is something inherent to multi-ethnic neighbourhoods only. Neighbour relations are often setting-specific (relations are interchangeable, scripted and bounded, and passively maintained), which is relevant for understanding the spatiality of neighbouring and the limited exchange of personal information between neighbours. Because neighbouring involves the balancing of personal privacy and close spatial proximity, the exchange of personal information is limited, while spatial proximity ensures easy access to observable (through seeing, hearing and smelling) categorical markers that signify class, ethnicity, lifestyle, etc. In this way, neighbour interaction reconstructs symbolic boundaries rather than breaking them down. m.r.r.ossewaarde@utwente.nl (Dragana Svraka and Ringo Ossewaarde) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/4.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/4.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:53:00 +0000 Dragana Svraka and Ringo Ossewaarde: Frame analysis was developed by Erving Goffman as a sociological concept, used for understanding how individual actors relate themselves to the world, creating coherent frames out of individual social experiences. We apply frame analysis in the emergent field of sociology of governance, using the example of low profile public issue of drug addiction in a specific local social and political context of a municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to understand the roles of governance actors and their social interactions in the attribution of meaning. We focus on mental organization of governance experiences related to drug addiction and the strategic involvement of different governance actors which use given frames. We discuss the importance of frame coherence and ways in which it can be achieved for the low profile issues. stella.chatzitheochari@surrey.ac.uk (Stella Chatzitheochari and Sara Arber) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/3.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/3.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:52:00 +0000 Stella Chatzitheochari and Sara Arber: Despite the recent theoretical focus on the emergence of the Third Age as a period of fulfilment and an ongoing engagement with an active leisure lifestyle, there is a dearth of quantitative studies on how older people spend their time. Few studies of later life capitalise on time-use surveys, which constitute the most widely employed and accurate methodology for collecting data on everyday life. This article analyses data from the 2000 UK Time Use Survey in order to operationalise the concept of the Third Age and test theoretical propositions regarding the irrelevance of social divisions in the formation of an active leisure lifestyle after retirement. The analysis focuses on a subsample of 1615 people over the age of 64. An index of active leisure activities is constructed in order to estimate the proportion of third agers amongst British retirees. Logistic regression models are specified to examine the relative influence of socio-demographic characteristics on the probability of a person being a third ager. Strong effects of structural factors and health are found, which do not support arguments suggesting a minor influence of social context in lifestyle choices after retirement. 'Active' ageing appears to be the province of those who are culturally and materially advantaged, and it is the healthy, educated, upper-class and middle-class men that are more likely to engage in a Third Age leisure lifestyle. t.e.fletcher@leedsmet.ac.uk (Thomas Fletcher) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/5.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/5.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:51:00 +0000 Thomas Fletcher: People in sport tend to possess rather jaded perceptions of its colour-blindness and thus, they are reluctant to confront the fact that, quite often racism is endemic. Yorkshire cricket in particular, has faced frequent accusations from minority ethnic communities of inveterate and institutionalised racism and territorial defensiveness. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews conducted with amateur white and British Asian cricketers, this paper examines the construction of regional identities in Yorkshire at a time when traditional myths and invented traditions of Yorkshire and 'Yorkshireness' are being deconstructed. This is conceptualised through a reading of John Clarke's 'magical recovery of community'. Although cricket has been multiracial for decades, I argue that some people's position as insiders is more straightforward than others. I present evidence to suggest that, regardless of being committed to Yorkshire and their 'Yorkshireness', white Yorkshire people may never fully accept British Asians as 'one of us'. Ideologically and practically, white Yorkshire people are engaged in constructing British Asians as anathema to Yorkshire culture. The paper concludes by advocating that, for sports cultures to be truly egalitarian, the ideology of sport itself has to change. True equality will only ever be achieved within a de-racialised discourse that not only accepts difference, but embraces it. aa9714@coventry.ac.uk (Mary Leaker and Priscilla Dunk-West) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/9.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/9.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:50:00 +0000 Mary Leaker and Priscilla Dunk-West: Risk narratives are of increasing importance in contemporary social life in that they help in understanding and anticipating the shifts that characterise our late modern landscape. Our qualitative research explores risk as it relates to violence toward street-based sex workers in a suburban Australian setting. Female street-based sex workers represent a highly stigmatised and marginalised group. International studies report that they experience high levels of sexual violence perpetrated by male clients and our empirical work with street-based sex workers in Adelaide, South Australia concurs with this finding. Despite many creative and specialized skills workers reported drawing upon to minimise the risk of violence to themselves, we argue that a socio-cultural lens is vital to viewing risk in this context. We argue that in order to effect change, risk must be disembedded from increasingly individualized discourses, since it is through the personalisation of risk that violence becomes legitimised as an occupational hazard in street-based sex work. taylory@lsbu.ac.uk (Yvette Taylor and Michelle Addison) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/6.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/6.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:49:00 +0000 Yvette Taylor and Michelle Addison: This article raises questions about who becomes the proper subject for (non)academic attention in a time when 'city publics' might be positioned as democratising and open or, conversely, as curtailed and shaped through specific and pre-determined economies of value and use. The use of the city and its residents are echoed in regeneration politics and objectives, attached to and brought forward by specific 'regenerative' subjects, now deemed 'resilient' and capacitated. Such rhetorics of inclusion and measurable impact are echoed within ideas of a 'public sociology', which the engaged researcher should practice as she re-engages differently located spaces and subjects. Here, questions are raised about the place of a 'public sociology' as part of a 'city publics', where understanding local disseminations and disparities is important in considering where different users, interviewees and indeed researchers are coming from. Having situated the fieldwork site, we initially focus on the expert advisory group and their constructions of the project's 'use-value'. We then consider the background 'shadows' in and out of 'expert' space, as a trailing presence of research intentions and trajectories. Ideas of public sociology - as with an open 'city publics' often assumes that all users are interested, willing to hear and appear as equal members of a 'community'. In contrast, the experience of engaging a user group may involve dis-engaging the research-researcher-researched and here we provide disruptions to a straightforward 'travelling through' research space as we walk through our research methodologies. This article presents professional and personal reflections on research experience as well as interpretative accounts of navigating fieldwork and city space. simone.sarti@unimi.it (Sara Della Bella, Simone Sarti, Mario Lucchini and Mara Tognetti Bordogna) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/7.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/7.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:48:00 +0000 Sara Della Bella, Simone Sarti, Mario Lucchini and Mara Tognetti Bordogna: The study of inequality in health concerns the relationship between socially structured characteristics and health outcomes. Howewer, health disparities are also linked to purely individual characteristics and contextual ones. In particular, the contextual effect at a national level may reflect differences in the functioning and performing of national health institutions, that may be conceived as further determinants of health inequalities. In this work we aim at estimating the effect of education on self-assessed health across European countries, taking into account potential confounders like age, gender and family social background. Using a multilevel model with individuals nested in countries, we can achieve two aims. First, we can see whether countries differ in their average self-assessed health score. Second, we can test our hypothesis about the existence of a European social gradient, that is that education exerts a relatively constant effect on self-assessed health. We develop our models using data from European Social Surveys (88,842 interviews). J.A.Gabb@open.ac.uk (Jacqui Gabb and Elizabeth B. Silva) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/23.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/23.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:47:00 +0000 Jacqui Gabb and Elizabeth B. Silva: [No abstract] gilliev@lsbu.ac.uk (Val Gillies) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/11.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/11.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:46:00 +0000 Val Gillies: This paper argues for a critical reclaiming of family and highlights the risks associated with decentring such a powerful and pervasive concept. Influential critiques of family as an organising category are considered in the context of a contemporary trend towards reorienting it within broader studies foregrounding personal and intimate realms of human connectedness. It is suggested that while concepts of personal lives and intimacy have much to offer they can not capture the full range and nature of relations raised through the lens of family. In particular the political consequences of subsuming family within wider approaches are set out through reference to a new public politics of family in which emphasis is placed less on structure and function, and more on knowledge and competence. Through an exploration of the key changes characterising this shift a case is made for retaining family (alongside intimacy and personal life) as a flexible, enduring and necessary sociological framework. Sue.Heath@manchester.ac.uk (Sue Heath, Derek McGhee and Paulina Trevena) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/12.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/12.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:45:00 +0000 Sue Heath, Derek McGhee and Paulina Trevena: This paper compares and contrasts some of the conceptual language used to engage with the realm of family and personal life within the parallel fields of transnational family studies (TFS) and British family studies (BFS). Key concepts which are now widely referenced within BFS - such as 'family practices', 'family display', 'families of choice' and 'connectedness' - have not been widely drawn upon within TFS. Instead, TFS scholars are developing alternative concepts such as 'ways of being' versus 'ways of belonging' and 'frontiering and relativising', often to capture very similar ideas to those current within BFS. This paper critically explores some of the concepts currently being used within transnational family studies, highlighting points of similarity and difference with the BFS tradition, and considers what these parallel literatures might learn from each other. The paper is illustrated by examples drawn from ESRC-funded research on the experiences of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. s.s.duncan@Bradford.ac.uk (Simon Duncan) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/13.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/13.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:44:00 +0000 Simon Duncan: Individualisation theory misrepresents and romanticises the nature of agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by circumstances and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to 'patch' or 'piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that 'do the thinking'. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a 're-serving' of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. But this process of bricolage will always be socially contested and socially uneven. In this way bricolage describes how people actually link structure and agency through their actions, and can provide a framework for empirical research on doing family. J.A.Gabb@open.ac.uk (Jacqui Gabb) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/10.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/10.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:43:00 +0000 Jacqui Gabb: Contemporary research has shown that families are constituted through everyday practices of intimacy with affinities being fashioned around the structuring principles of openness and reciprocity alongside or superseding traditional ties of obligation and responsibility. Paradoxically in many instances powerful differences and inequalities among intimates remain intransigent, undermining claims on the democratisation of intimacy. In this article I want to examine how people make sense of difference and significant otherness in family lives, focusing attention on embedded practices that span across interpersonal, human-object, natural-cultural boundaries. I focus on three examples; these are relations between humans and animals, parents and children, people and objects. These relations are structured through species, gendered, generational and subject-object differences, but these categorical distinctions do not set apart the self and other. Instead they demonstrate how otherness is part of everyday relational living. Thus, to put personal relationships and families in context, I contend that we need to reframe the analytical lens around an ethics of otherness. l.jamieson@ed.ac.uk (Lynn Jamieson) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/15.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/15.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:42:00 +0000 Lynn Jamieson: This article focuses on intimacy in terms of its analytical potential for understanding social change without the one-nation blinkers sometimes referred to as 'methodological nationalism' and without Euro-North-American ethnocentrism. Extending from the concept of family practices, practices of intimacy are sketched and examples considered across cultures. The cultural celebration and use of the term 'intimacy' is not universal, but practices of intimacy are present in all cultures. The relationship of intimacy to its conceptual relatives is clarified. A brief discussion of subjectivity and social integration restates the relevance of intimate relationships and practices of intimacy to understanding social change in an era of globalisation, despite the theoretical turn away from embodied face to face relationships. Illustrations concerning intimacy and social change in two areas of personal life, parental authority and gender relations, indicate that practices of intimacy can re-inscribe inequalities such as those of age, class and gender as well as subvert them and that attention to practices of intimacy can assist the need to explain continuity as well as change. r.thomson@open.ac.uk (Mary Jane Kehily and Rachel Thomson) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/16.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/16.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:41:00 +0000 Mary Jane Kehily and Rachel Thomson: This paper contributes to the theme of the special issue by identifying concepts that both embody relationality and have the capacity to address and articulate temporal processes. Based on an empirical study of first time motherhood, we offer a sensitising conceptual framework which privileges the temporal, scaffolding the macro socio-historical with the micro personal and subjective. The study combines longitudinal and intergenerational approaches to develop an understanding of maternal experience as it unfolds, while forging connections between individual biography, generational investments and intergenerational dynamics. Drawing on a conceptual tool kit from life history, cultural studies, social psychology and sociology, we profile two biographical case studies as an illustration of our approach. Our analysis of their contrasting experiences as 'young' and 'old' mothers demonstrates the salience of key conceptual terms including 'generation', 'situation' and 'narrative' and how this conceptual framework can both map and animate accounts of contemporary mothering. d.h.j.morgan@keele.ac.uk (David H. G. Morgan) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/14.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/14.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:40:00 +0000 David H. G. Morgan: The idea of 'family practices' is now quite widely used in British family sociology. The aim of this article is to locate this reformulation by looking, firstly, at the term's place within more general discussions of practices and, secondly, to explore the implications of a more specific focus on family practices. Through a comparison with some other possible and overlapping approaches, I consider the extent and ways in which the family practices approach successfully goes 'beyond' more established understandings of family. d.moxon@shu.ac.uk (David Moxon) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/19.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/19.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:39:00 +0000 David Moxon: This paper argues that in order to be properly comprehended, the 'riots' of August 2011 must be located in the context of an increasingly consumerist society. The suggestion is that the riots represented conformity to the underlying values of a consumerist society, if, momentarily, not its norms. To make this case, the riots are divided into three constituent 'moments'; the initial, the acquisitive and the nihilistic. Themes and ideas from the literature on consumer culture and crime are applied to the latter two. c.grover@lancaster.ac.uk (Chris Grover) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/18.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/18.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:38:00 +0000 Chris Grover: The wave of social protest that swept across England in August 2011 has predominantly been explained by political elites through appeals to various approaches that have in common individualistic frameworks of reference. Issues related to the material condition of society are either little analysed or, among the political elite, ruled out as an explanation of it. However, it is clear from both the historical literature on social protest and the contemporary literature on relationships between crime and inequality that explanations ignoring inequalities, particularly economic inequalities, are problematic. Hgorring@staffmail.ed.ac.uk (Hugo Gorringe and Michael Rosie) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/17.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/17.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:37:00 +0000 Hugo Gorringe and Michael Rosie: As journalists and academics, politicians and other commentators struggled to make sense of the social unrest across England, they reached for theoretical understandings of the crowd that have long since been discredited. The powerful imagery of the madding crowd has always been a popular trope with journalists, but what concerned us was the way in which even sociological commentators echoed such ideas. This paper, therefore, draws on our past research, informal interviews with senior police officers and media accounts to offer an analysis of the riots, how they were policed, and contemporary understandings of crowd behaviour. In so doing we question whether current understandings of collective behaviour, deriving from socio-political expressions of anger or protest, are equipped to make sense of the English riots. Similarly, we ask whether police public order tactics need to change. We conclude that the residual attachment to myths of the madding crowd continues to hamper the search for flexible, graded and legitimate means of managing social unrest. stephaniealicebaker@live.com (Stephanie Alice Baker) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/21.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/21.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:36:00 +0000 Stephanie Alice Baker: Commentary on the recent riots largely reflects ideological differences with political discourse reviving traditional debates of social inequality and moral decline. While the 2011 riots resemble former incidents of rioting in twentieth-century Britain, it is argued that the recent unrest was significantly enhanced by the development of new social media, requiring new understandings of mediated crowd membership in the twenty-first century. I introduce and outline a model of the 'mediated crowd' commencing with the impact of new social media, and develop this paradigm in conjunction with emotions research, to account for the emotional dimensions of collective action, and the social and political effects of public communication in the virtual arena. Here, it is argued that attempts to understand the causes of the recent riots must recognise that while social media contributed to the speed and scope of the unrest, emotions play a crucial role in motivating and sustaining collective action. This innovative approach provides insight into the particular conditions in which the English riots emerged, while demonstrating how social media contributes more broadly to new forms of collectivity in the media age. M.Z.Varul@exeter.ac.uk (Matthias Zick Varul) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/22.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/22.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:35:00 +0000 Matthias Zick Varul: Drawing on Veblen's concept of 'pecuniary prowess' I will argue that the August riots can be understood not so much in terms of protest but as an appropriation of the underlying acquisitive logic of capitalism. The violent realisation of that logic across class divides has become more likely due to an erosion in plausibility of discourses of meritocratic legitimacy. Recent denigrating discourses around "chavs" as dangerous and undeserving poor can be understood as attempts to reinstate meritocratic legitimacy rhetorically, but in an increasingly unequal society this becomes an ever more difficult enterprise. On the other hand, the assertion of the order of property through an effective police response may have eased the pressure by providing evidence that anxieties about a full scale insurgence are unfounded. J.Solomos@city.ac.uk (John Solomos) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/20.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/20.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:34:00 +0000 John Solomos: The riots of August 2011 have led to renewed discussion about the conditions that help to shape outbreaks of urban unrest. The role of race and ethnicity in the riots is one of the factors that has been discussed, although it has received relatively little attention when compared to earlier riots in 1981 and 1985. This paper argues that it is important to avoid easy generalisations about the role of race in the events of August 2011. It then explores the links between the riots and issues such as policing, urban deprivation and unemployment, and political inclusion and exclusion. It suggests that there is a need to locate the riots within their specific local and social environments and for more empirically focused research on the localities in which they occurred. K.Murji@open.ac.uk (Karim Murji and Sarah Neal) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/24.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/24.html Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:33:00 +0000 Karim Murji and Sarah Neal: The 2011 riots have already been the most commented upon riots of recent decades. Casting some doubt about generalised and holistic explanations and responses, we seek to locate the events in a matrix of race, policing and politics. This approach enables us to identify shifts in political discourse around the riots from the simple to the complex, as well as significant changes between how the events of 2011 and earlier riots have been 'read'. We seek to unravel some of these strands, to show how race, place and political discourse have been located in the reaction to the riots. In drawing attention to important unevenness, we argue that sociologists need to focus on both continuities and changes since the 1980s.