This paper offers a critical analysis of ‘groupism’ and suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing ethnicity without invoking the imagery of bounded groups. Alternative conceptual strategies focus on practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events. The conceptual critique has implications for the ways in which researchers, journalists, policymakers and NGOs address ‘ethnic conflict’ and ‘ethnic violence’. The paper concludes with an analysis of an empirical case from Eastern Europe.

The article purports to describe and explain the emergence and development of postmodernism as a multi-faceted cultural movement. Data on numbers of publications are presented to show the expansion of postmodernism and shifts in relative attention to various topics. The explanation focuses on processes in three interconnected cultural fields—the artistic, the intellectual and the academic—, which were influenced by wider social transformations.

The study purports to show how a bias, known as methodological nationalism, has weighed down research and investigation on migration until recently. Relying on the contribution of work on transnational communities, the authors propose a programmatic conclusion.

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

Both of these books can be highly recommended, but for different reasons. Christopher Hann's edited collection will help to raise the profile of the social anthropological approach in post-communist studies, and our awareness of attitudes ‘on the ground’, especially in rural communities. The methodologies of the Emigh and Szelényi collection will be more familiar to most readers, but the book contains valuable new data and some welcome problematising of concepts such as poverty and underclass.

Two ambitious books providing a socio-economic overview are analysed: Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, and Le nouvel ordre économique mondial by Élie Cohen. Based on scientifically solid documentation, these works contain an ideological element and do not shy away from prophecy. As such, they form part of an approach that is not quite scientific and that, nevertheless, rightly has a place in sociology.