This article advances the argument that we are becoming a post-work society, and that the restoration of work-centred society is an irrational and untenable goal. I consider the phenomenon of jobless growth and suggest that the economy’s declining need for labour is underestimated due to the influence of three factors: a statistical dependence on jobs held rather than hours worked; the growth of socially unproductive personal services; and the growth of destructive, defensive and unsustainable forms of production. I show that the decentring of work in people’s lives is a process well under way, and conclude that the ‘crisis’ of work-based society derives not from the scarcity of work, but from a theoretical and practical failure to give the decline of work a human meaning.

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.

Based on interviews with 122 men who had used violence against their partner, and employing Goffman's (1971) concept of ‘remedial work’, this paper interrogates violent men's perceptions, constructions and understandings of domestic violence and their responses to its use. Accounts of women partners are also examined. ‘Remedial work’ involves the perpetrator of an act of untoward behaviour in various forms of ‘damage limitation’ intended to change the meaning of the offensive act into one that is deemed acceptable. Goffman's three related devices of remedial work – ‘accounts, apologies, and requests’ – are used to explore men's narratives of violent events, their definitions of the event, rationales and perceptions of consequences. Revealed are the exculpatory and expiatory discourses which dominate men's narratives and which expose the purposeful yet paradoxical nature of their responses to violence, directed at mitigating and obfuscating culpability while at the same time seeking forgiveness and absolution. We suggest that through these devices men seek to impose their own definitions upon their woman partner and thereby neutralise or eradicate her experience of abuse and control the ways in which she interprets and responds to it. These findings strongly support Goffman's theoretical conception. In addition, they highlight the need for further investigation of how men's and women's accounts, definitions and responses to violence are interactionally connected through men's attempts to define the violence in exculpatory and expiatory terms and in women's resistance to such definitions and their implications.

This paper reconsiders the possibility for unification of sociological theory by the rational choice model. This is induced by the claims of rational choice theorists that extending this model from economics to sociology can be conducive to establishing a unifying paradigm and method to be given ‘paradigmatic privilege’ within sociology. The outcome of such an extension of the economic approach has been ‘sociological rational choice theory’ or ‘rational action theory for sociology’. Within sociology, such a rational choice model is regarded as a major theoretical or/and methodological innovation and thus a ‘new’ promise for sociology's unification. Overall, the paper suggests that these ‘ecumenistic’ claims of rational choice theorists cannot be taken at face value since they are predicated upon dubious views of the relations between economy and society and between economics and sociology, including inadequate interpretations of neoclassical economics.

Anti-Catholicism is part of the dynamics of Northern Ireland's conflict and is critical to the self-defining identity of certain Protestants. However, anti-Catholicism is as much a sociological process as a theological dispute about doctrine. It was given a Scriptural underpinning in the history of Protestant–Catholic relations in Ireland, and wider British–Irish relations, in order to reinforce social divisions between the religious communities and to offer a deterministic belief system to justify them. This article examines the socio-economic and political processes that have led to theology being used in social closure and stratification. It describes the various forms of contemporary anti-Catholicism, and highlights two further sociological features of the process, the common-sense reasoning process which reproduces it and how, in its language, it operates as a ‘discursive formation’.

This essay reflects on the ethical and reflexive considerations surrounding the use of student fieldwork reports on a course on the sociology of religion. Using reflexivity as a teaching strategy coincides with changes in sociological approaches to religion where experiential and substantive issues are stressed in its study. Reflexive and ethical issues that emerge on courses on sexuality and gender politics are compared to those which seem peculiar to the teaching of religion from a sociological perspective. Study of these fieldwork reports disclosed the way students faced their own ethical worries in a task generated to enhance their own reflexivity but also an understanding of religiosity.

Considering the prospects for poverty in the next twenty-five years, this article argues that trends in poverty over the last two decades or so are not a good guide for the future because the increase in poverty occurring during that time was exceptional in the context of this century. Further, it was not an experience common to most other industrialised countries. Three key factors will determine future prospects for poverty. First, demographic prospects are mainly good – children and the elderly are high risk groups: the number of children will fall and the proportion of older people does not increase as much as in the last two decades. However, family change will continue to generate poverty. Secondly, prospects for the economy look as good as they have been for decades and, in particular, competition for jobs will decline, increasing the opportunities for those excluded from the labour market. The third and key factor will be the impact of politics on policy. Reducing poverty and abolishing child poverty within twenty years are targets of the Labour Government. However there are anxieties about their reliance on labour market solutions. There will still need to be redistribution in favour of those who cannot get access to paid work. There is then a discussion of some of the challenges for social research. In conclusion, the prospects for reducing poverty are good, particularly if government regains an appetite for redistribution.

Urban and rural sociology is currently dominated by two relatively separate approaches. One perspective emphasises political economy and increasing globalisation. Another focuses on the meaning of urban and rural areas in people's lives. This paper argues for a fusion between these two views. Urban and rural sociology should be concerned with the relations between political economy on the one hand and the biological and psychological bases of human behaviour on the other. Recent developments in the human sciences and psychology assist in making this link. They can be used to extend the original insights of the early Chicago School of sociology, particularly as regards the formation of human identities. Nevertheless, there remain substantial arguments as to how ‘the Chicago School's biotic level’ should be conceptualised and how we envisage its links to the more conscious, pre-planned, aspects of human behaviour. Early Marx and Williams's now somewhat neglected work on the country and the city offer provocative yet helpful ways forward.

This paper argues that notions of the future and social change have been central to the sociological enterprise since its inception. However, sociology developed with the modern project and the rise of nation-states. This is reflected in the way that sociology has consistently taken for granted the geography of the nation-state as a basic organising principle for the understanding of social formations, producing ‘national’ sociologies. Thus, while providing a view of Britain in 2025, this paper also asks questions about the imaginary that constitutes Britain and the ways in which it will be re-visioned as part of the ‘global cosmopolitan society’. This re-visioning is not, however, the preserve of sociology and the paper elaborates popular imaginaries on the future of Britain. A recurring theme within visions of the future is the binary between utopias and dystopias, reframed in relation to the impact of new technologies and discussions of cyberspace. The paper examines the impact of these debates on the sociological imagination and the future of the sociological enterprise.

David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (eds.), Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek and London: Altamira, 1997, £39.00, paperback £18.95, 432 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-9188-3).

Rosanna Hertz (ed.), Reflexivity and Voice. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, xviii+1318 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-0383-6).

Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (eds.), Memory, Identity, Com-munity: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, $19.95 paperback, xxxii+1393 pp. (ISBN 0-7914-3323-4).

Deborah E. Reed-Danahay (ed.), Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg, 1997, £34.99, paperback £14.99, xi+1277 pp. (ISBN 1-85973-970-9).

Kim Marie Vaz (ed.), Oral Narrative Research with Black Women. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, x+1262 pp. (ISBN 0-8039-7428-0).

Whether or not you subscribe to the view that the grand narratives of history,modernity and enlightenment are passé, you cannot fail to notice the proliferation of smaller, local narratives. The literature of the social sciences is increasingly populated by a variety of lives, life-histories, auto/biographies, auto-ethnographies and other narratives. Sociologists, anthropologists and others, in increasing numbers, have been turning their attention to the collection and documentation of ‘lives’, including their own. The biographical has taken on a renewed currency, invested with methodological and ethical significance. There is a polyphony of ‘voices’ clamouring for attention. There is, of course, nothing absolutely novel in this. At one time, life-histories and similar documents of life were celebrated as a prime source of sociological data and insight, articulating the intersection between the personal and the social. The career or the life could thus be seen to capture some of the complex relationships between socialisation and social organisation, between process and social order, or between institutions and the person. Having for some time been eclipsed and all but excluded from the methodological canon, the biographical perspective has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. There has been an upsurge of empirical, methodological and reflective writing on biographical approaches to social research. They have received fresh legitimation from a variety of contemporary standpoints — feminist, post-structuralist and postcolonialist among them. Indeed, the celebration of multiple ‘voices’ to be found in much of the literature parallels the multiplicity of epistemological ‘positions’ to be found in contemporary social research. The books under review — and many other in the same genre — reflect those different perspectives, illustrating at once the various opportunities and limitations of contemporary work in this area. In their diversity they also display the extent to which various sub-genres develop in mutual isolation, mirroring specific disciplinary, national and empirical preoccupations. Collectively they embody a number of unresolved tensions in the systematic exploration of social actors' lives, voices and identities.

Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, £30.95, xxi+1098 pp. (ISBN 0-674-81647-1)

Alvin I. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, £16.99 paperback, xiii+407 pp. (ISBN 0-19-823820-7)

Social epistemology versus social ontology

About a dozen years ago I started a journal and wrote a book, both with the name social epistemology (Fuller 1988; Fuller 1996). In the intervening years a few intrepid philosophers and sociologists have tried to map this area, and the two books under review represent two very important, yet very different, efforts from both sides of the disciplinary divide. But before proceeding further, I should say that ‘social epistemology’ is not the only rubric that philosophers and sociologists have used to map a common conceptual space. To be sure, in the days when Popper and Wittgenstein aroused passions, ‘philosophy of the social sciences’ could lay fair claim to that goal. Much of the work of Gouldner, Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu is also easily interpreted as exercises in social epistemology, as each in its own way theorises the place of the knower in the production of social knowledge. However, at the same time, there has been considerable resistance to social epistemology amongst both philosophers and sociologists in Britain. (It is no coincidence that Collins and Goldman are American.) Instead, what may be called social ontology turns out to be the terms in which philosophy and sociology have sought common ground, and much of what today passes for ‘social theory’ – especially that which takes Anthony Giddens as a significant presence – falls under this rubric (Fuller 1995).

One of the central ways in which institutional racism is perpetuated is through the designation of the somatic norm. However, although the classed and gendered nature of the somatic norm underlying somataphobic representations of the universal ‘individual’ have been both theoretically and substantially explored, the racial character of this embodied being has received scant attention. This paper introduces race to the wider debates on the embodied nature of the political ‘individual’, before analysing the specific ways in which an institution that is deemed to be at the absolute apex of disembodied, neutral professionalism – the British senior civil service – is naturalised as the domain for white men. The somatic norm underlying the representation of the impartial senior civil service is brought to the fore in this paper by discussing the location of black senior civil servants, whose presence helps us to highlight the synchronic relationship between racialised bodies and elite spaces in the body politic. These ‘Space Invaders’ disturb the racialised nature of these spaces whilst at the same time adhering to the assimilative pressure of the somatic norm. An engagement with the interview accounts of black senior civil servants allows us to grasp some idea of what it is like for them to coexist in a place that is built on a ‘racial contract’ which has demarcated spaces in accordance with racialised corporealities. As matter out of place these ‘different’ bodies generate disorientation, undergo the burden of invisibility and abide by the racialised and classed informal rules of behaviour, particularly those of the legitimate language. All of which problematises the notion of ‘difference’ in organisations as entailing much more than the mere existence of ‘different’ bodies, on the basis of race or gender.

This article is based on research among beauty therapists in two cities. Therapists saw their work less in terms of what it does to make women look better, more in terms of what it does to make women feel better. They described the treatment as offering stress relief and greater self-confidence, but also described the work they do to manage their own emotions in the salon. Beauty therapy could, therefore, be seen as a form of what Hochschild has called ‘emotional labour’. The authors argue that this claim can be understood ‘as an instance of occupational rhetoric’; the interviewees stressed the emotional work they performed as an argument for a better and more professional perception of beauty therapy than it actually enjoys. But it can also be read as a description of aspects of the labour process in which they are engaged. Like much emotional labour this expenditure of effort on the part of the beauty therapists is not reflected in pay and conditions, being to a large extent socially ‘invisible’ in a highly gendered (but not sexualised) occupation. Therefore the claim to perform emotional labour may be a somewhat risky strategy in terms of developing a ‘professional project’ for beauty therapy.

Heine Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen (eds.) 2000. Classical and Modern Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 524 pp. (0-6312-1288-4)

Zygmunt Bauman 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 228 pp. (0-7456-2410-3)

Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli and Frank Webster (eds.) 1999. Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present. London: Sage, 502 pp. (0-7619-5926-2)

Gerard Delanty 2000. Modernity and Postmodernity. London: Sage, 194 pp. (0-7619-5904-1)

Roberta Garner (ed.) 2000. Social Theory: Continuity and Confrontation. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 592 pp. (1-5511-1235-3)

Trevor Noble 2000. Social Theory and Social Change. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 260 pp. (0-3339-1239-X)

There seems something oddly old-fashioned about assessing the contemporaneity of a critical text by the number of women writers that it recognises – but then there are times when only the bluntest of tools will do. I reached this conclusion while searching for a suitable core text for a social theory module. I had two key concerns: to find texts that offered thoughtful accounts of the different ways of theorising the relationship between modernity and postmodernity; and to find texts that would represent the full diversity of social theory. The second has not proved easy, and reading the most recent surveys of the field, one could be forgiven for thinking that gender played a negligible role in the functioning of contemporary society. Supposedly comprehensive surveys of the field, such as Callinicos's Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, manage to nod to such quaintly unreadable figures as Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer, without giving over a single page to feminism, and offer indexes that run on forever without mentioning the work of a single woman writer. What, then, is a good way forward for students?

The importance of reporting estimates and confidence intervals for statistical analyses has been well publicised in the arena of medical studies for some years now. The requirement to give confidence intervals for the main results of a study has been included in the statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals since the 1980s and methodological points such as this are discussed in the Statistical Notes section of the British Medical Journal. If the use of quantitative methods in British sociology is to be encouraged, as Frank Bechhofer (1996) suggests is needed, it is important to have a forum for the dissemination of basic methodological issues which is accessible to researchers within the discipline. This note aims to achieve such dissemination by using an example from current research to illustrate this fundamental, but often overlooked, aspects of quantitative analysis.

Alberto Melucci, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, £13.95 paperback, vii+177 pp. (ISBN 0-521-56482-4)

Charles Lemert, Postmodernism Is Not What You Think, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997, £15.99 paperback, xiv+185 pp. (ISBN 1-55786-286-9)

Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner (eds.), The Politics of Jean-François Lyotard, London: Routledge, 1998, £55.00, vii+168 pp. (ISBN 0-415-11724-0)

Barry Smart, Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality, London: Sage, 1998, £45.00 hardback (£14.99 paperback), 224 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-5520-8)

Postmodernism is routinely identified with political radicalism. From one angle, it is easy enough to see why this is so, for many of the leading theorists of postmodernity hail from that side of the political spectrum (such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson). From another angle, though, it is much less obvious that postmodernism is itself a radical social and political concern. Indeed, the opposite might plausibly be argued. What has happened with the advent of so-called postmodern society is the collapse of modernist rationality, core community values, and ethical and moral foundations. The sociological message in this reading is that postmodernism, in fact, spells a repressive reorganisation of everyday life within the ideological structures of the global capitalist economy itself. Thus the advent of postmodernism – with its dazzling globalisation of social relations, its deconstruction of metaphysical foundations, its reifying of technology and its cult of consumer hedonism – fits hand in glove with the imperatives of a market logic in which everything goes but nothing much counts. Or so the story goes.

This paper focuses on the cultural and social consequences of the new forms of work organisation variously described as engineered workplace culture, flexibilisation, teamwork, employee involvement, quality circles and post-Fordism. Some celebrate the new form of worker this creates as a consumer of organisationally provided meanings. However, the choices are quite limited for workers in engineered cultures, and for the self-discovering subjects of consumer capitalism more generally. The language, norms and values of engineered cultures become internalised and dominate employees' subjectivity. Further, a sociological analysis of institutional structures of consumer capitalism, and engineered cultures in particular, points to how they encourage workers to develop moral frameworks that are individualistic, with little concern for other people. Simone Weil's studies of the workplace are used to argue that a culture that encourages an ethical orientation of respect for the other is at the heart of good work.

Anthony Elliott, The Mourning of John Lennon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, $45.00 hardback ($17.95 paperback), xi+219 pp. (ISBN 0-520-21549-4)

Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (eds.), Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief, London: Routledge, 1999, £13.99 paperback, xi+218 pp. (ISBN 0-415-19393-1)

Tony Walter (ed.), The Mourning for Diana, Oxford: Berg, 1999, £14.99 paperback, xiii+286 pp. (ISBN 1-85973-238-0)

Within the last decade or so there has been a growing recognition among sociologists of the role played by emotions in various aspects of human behaviour (witness, for example, the range of articles appearing in Sociology alone, e.g. Jackson 1993; Craib 1995; Burkitt 1997, and the formation of a BSA study group devoted to the sociology of emotion). This burgeoning focus on emotions has challenged sociology to rethink its dominant conception of the human subject as governed by rational and conscious thought alone. In so doing it has raised a question mark both against the adequacy of the (theoretical) tools used for analysing emotions which have developed from these premises and the ability of sociology in general to provide answers to such questions.

Early formulations of the social model of disability have been subject to critical amendment by disabled women. Disabled women activists have, however, been equally critical of the failure of mainstream feminism to recognise the disability perspective. This article continues the approach taken by the author in an earlier paper in which she proposed the development of a model which understands the concerns of disabled women as central to both feminism and disability politics. It explores some of the complexities of a feminist agenda for disabled women in the linked arenas of sexuality, reproduction and motherhood, considering the contribution of a disability rights perspective to these core areas of feminist debate. It moves on to examine the potential contribution of a feminist disability perspective to the reconceptualisation of informal caring, where the experience of disabled women might help to untangle some of the dilemmas experienced by both men and women in the critical issues of caring and dependence.

This paper argues for a structural definition of oppression as systematic mistreatment. Using the work of Connell and other theorists, I discuss the implications of the proposed definition for the oppression of women and suggest that men, too, are systematically mistreated and therefore oppressed in modern societies. This structural concept of men's oppression is compared with the idea developed in the men's movement of the 1970s that men are oppressed by sex roles, and with more recent discourses of masculinity. I argue that men may have conflicting interests in relation to the gender order. While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many senses benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed by and within it. Since in many ways men's human needs and capacities are not met within the gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent ‘emancipatory interest’ in their transformation.