This paper is concerned with a rather neglected issue in sociological analysis: honour as a value and regulating principle of social life. The attempt is made to study honour from a perspective which pays attention to both the carriers of honour and the social order itself, its maintenance and reproduction. It focuses on a group of Spanish traders who were fervent Catholics who claimed and were reputed to be men of honour. The article shows that honour was incarnated in two external domains: the family house and lineage, providing status-honour, and the trading routes, which brought our group fame as courageous and trustworthy men. Engaging with contemporary debates, it is contended that neither trust nor ethics need be brought to the exchanges from the outside, as is the case with modern capitalist forms, for they are a function of personalised social bonding and embedded in honour itself.

By examining the history of the development of the tobacco industry, a key state industrial sector in China's reform era, this article shows how market-building processes and state-building processes have produced and reproduced each other in economic transitions from planned toward market economies. First, the market competition between state-owned tobacco firms and non-state tobacco firms in the early 1980s resulted in the establishment of a vertical bureaucracy, through a statemonopoly institution. Second, new market dynamics resulted in the transfer of monopoly power from the central government to the local governments. During this process the horizontal bureaucracies governing the tobacco industry in localities were driven into market competitors, while the vertical bureaucracy was greatly undermined. The evidence from the Chinese tobacco industry shows that the project of market-building for postcommunist countries is not a unilateral process. To obtain a complete understanding of transitional economies of postcommunist countries, I suggest that the key is the interaction between state-building and market-building, with a focus on how the specific market dynamics have rebuilt the state structures.

This article was originally published in 1915; it stands out as a rare example of an attempt to sociologically understand the main features of the war conducted with universal conscription. The process in which the machinery of war made itself more and more autonomous is analysed. The same process made the nations at war more and more similar, despite the ideological claims of radical differences.

This article considers six factors that are currently shaping the religious life of Europe. These are the Judaeo-Christian heritage, the continuing influence of the historic churches, the changing patterns of church-going, new arrivals from outside, secular reactions and the growing significance of religion in the modern world order. Any assessment of the future of religion in Europe must take all of these into account, not least their mutual and necessarily complex interactions.

The article is focused on one specific aspect of organized crime during the period of social transformation of Bulgarian society. It views the capacity of organized crime to offer additional power resources and encouragement for the political elite, whose power and domination have been threatened by the changes. The analysis is based on the thesis that to sustain and to strengthen their power and domination the elites have applied the strategy of increased secrecy and informality of power sources and of the means of their exertion via the establishment and control of criminal structures. The applied research methods include participant observation, in-depth interviews and document analysis.