This article considers aspects of the use of class in sociology and anthropology since the period around 1970, when Neo-Marxism became important in the social sciences, and is concerned primarily with Marxist and Weberian uses of the concept. It considers changes in the use of class in terms of two dimensions. One is the degree to which class is placed in a more macroscopic or more microscopic frame. The other is the degree to which class is defined in more objectivist terms or relies more on the way that the people being studied use the term. It is argued that since around 1970 writing on class has tended to become more microscopic and subjectivist. This tendency is related to changes within the two disciplines and within society more generally. The article closes with a consideration of some of the costs of this changing scholarly orientation to class.

The paper argues that contemporary capitalism must be studied as a society rather than an economy, and contemporary society as capitalist society. Capitalism is defined as a specific institutionalization of economic action in the form of a specifically dynamic system of social action, with a tendency to expand into, impose itself on and consume its non-economic and non-capitalist social and institutional context, unless contained by political resistance and regulation. The paper illustrates its perspective by four brief sketches, depicting contemporary capitalism as a historically dynamic social order, a culture, a polity, and a way of life. All four examples, it is claimed, demonstrate the superiority of a longitudinal-historical approach over static cross-sectional comparisons, and of focusing on the commonalities of national versions of capitalisms rather than their “varieties”.

This paper argues that the class-based analyses that seek to make sense of the recent transformation of Turkish modernity rest on a pre-given duality between the state and the bourgeoisie. This not only jettisons the relational and temporal context in which classes define and articulate their interests, thereby leading to determinist explanations of various sorts, but also obscures the historical distinctiveness and mutual re-transformation of two different modes of socio-spatial organization, modernity and capitalism, in Turkey. Based on a novel historical materialist method known as Political Marxism, I suggest that re-conceptualizing class as property-relations sheds new light on the historical-comparative specificity of Turkish modernity, which, in turn, leads to a radical re-interpretation of Turkey’s recent transformation.

Since the beginning of the 19th century the Balkans has been a synonym for aggressive nationalism and unbridled violence; the two phenomena traditionally understood to be the key obstacles for its social development. This paper contests such views by arguing that it was the absence of protracted warfare and coherent nationalist doctrines that distinguishes the history of South Eastern Europe from the rest of the continent. Drawing critically on bellicose historical sociology and modernist theories of nationalism - with a spotlight on the work of Charles Tilly and Ernest Gellner. Drawing critically on bellicose historical sociology and modernists theories of nationalism the paper makes a case that it was not the abundance of nationalism and organised violence but rather their historical scarcity that proved decisive for the slow pace of social development in the Balkans.

Conceptualisations of the state as a reified entity fall short in the case of socialist Laos. Foreign commentators often imagine Lao political life through a discourse of state governance, yet the Lao themselves, in popular narratives, tend to emphasise their day to day interactions with state officials. In their everyday lives, the latter are treated as individuals with which it is possible to interact. This article explores the relations between the Lao people and their government officials, and how those relations have changed in recent history (mainly since 1975). Wedding receptions – vital events in Lao social life, where power is invoked through performance and representation – are taken as case studies for the analysis of authority and legitimacy in a socialist state context.

“Diversity” is the focus of a wide-ranging corpus of normative discourses, institutional structures, policies and practices in business, public sector agencies, the military, universities and professions. Here, a brief account of the rise and diffusion of the term is provided. It now addresses a wide variety of social differences, while at least six distinct facets or goals of diversity policy can be discerned. Ambiguity, multivocality and banality are key characteristics of diversity discourse, but these function to strengthen, rather than weaken, the spread and acceptance of the notion. In many settings the commitment to diversity is mainstreamed, expected, and even taken-for-granted. Diversity discourse is related to ongoing processes of social diversification, but its diffusion is not driven by these processes. Overall, despite its many imprecisions, the impacts of the diversity corpus entail a transformation, or at least refinement, of the social imaginary.

In his paper Ethnicity as Cognition (2006), Rogers Brubaker held that cognitive psychology can enrich the understanding of the practices of categorisation that underpins ethnicity, nationhood and race. I shall argue that the philosophical debate concerning the different types of explanation in social sciences – the explanations based on reasons and the explanations based on causal mechanisms – can throw some light on this issue. To analyse beliefs requires use of both approaches. It can be shown with the classical opposition between an ethnic and a civic conception of national belonging which derives from a reason-based approach. The causal mechanism approach underlying cognitive psychology can offer alternative models accounting for national self-understanding, notably the prototype model of categorisation. I confront empirically these two theories – the ethnic civic dichotomy and the prototype model – using the issp data from 2003 and evidence the advantages and shortcomings of each theory.

This article bridges the literatures on nationalist projects and everyday nationhood by elucidating a repertoire of actions shared by both. Analysis of such “nation-work” contributes to the cognitive turn in ethnicity and nationalism research by showing how ethnonational categorization operates. Examining variation in this domain shows that though nationalism may project an image of a homogeneous “we”, internal heterogeneity is crucial for refining the experience and performance of membership in the nation.

For more than a century the processes of making academic appointments to Italian universities have regularly made news – bad news. The charges are serious: abuses of professorial power, collusion to fix outcomes in advance, favouritism to loyal followers, tolerance of mediocrity, indifference to scholarly merit. None of the many modifications to the selection rules between 1865 and 2010 has been reckoned effective in extirpating corruption and entrenching meritocracy. Drawing on participant observation of appointment processes in anthropology, I shall question the extent to which they do indeed represent a straightforward example of corruption. In particular, by considering both the formal rules and the academic community which has to use them to reproduce itself, I shall explore the possibility that the practices branded “corrupt” might more often be interpreted as efforts to reward merit rather than as conspiracies to flout it.

Standard versions of the sociology of rational practice assume justificationist theories of rationality: all rational beliefs are justified and rational individuals do not believe any non-justified statements. This theory appears to some to offer the possiblity of finding “deeper” insights into social behavior: some actions presented by actors as “rational” can, in fact, be explained as non-justified and, therefore, as mere consequences of prestige and/or power conflicts. When, however, it turns out that no theories can be justified, then all theories are irrational. This leads to relativism. The possibility, that we may profitably construct alternative theories of rationality is, in contrast, raised nearly uniquely by fallibilist theories of rationality. In order to take advantage of this, an alternative to the dominant methodological individualist theory of rational action is needed and possible. According to this alternative, rational action consists of problem-solving within institutional contexts without justification. Such a non-relativist sociology of rational practice can be enlightening and useful. Differing institutional contexts offer differing standards of rationality.

This research aims to describe the process of integration of Luxembourg’s Portuguese. To achieve this, we first conduct a summary review of the sociological literature about integration. Once the conceptual framework established, we measure and link the two essential aspects of integration: the socio-economic integration and the acculturation. To complete, we confront the Portuguese population resident of Luxembourg to those residing in Portugal in order to highlight the degree of acculturation of Portuguese immigrants and their descendants with the Luxembourg society. This research has required the use of data from the Luxembourg European Values Study (EVS) of 2008 as we measure acculturation from questions about the values of individuals. We prove that compared with their parents, the descendants of Portuguese immigrants, regarding their native social environment, are experiencing upward social mobility associated with the development of an “hybrid” cultural identity, composed of values both of the country of birth of their parents and of Luxembourg.