One of the most characteristic features of contemporary debates in the social sciences is the growth of interest in non-class forms of social division and identity, accompanied by an increasing focus on ethnic and gender inequalities. This paper attempts to provide a frame for incorporating such divisions into stratification theory by placing the notion of ‘social division’ at centre stage and redrawing its boundaries. The paper pays particular attention to ethnicity and class for the purposes of the argument. It is argued that a theorisation of social divisions can show how non-class forms of division and identity constitute central elements of the stratification system of modern societies. Such an approach also marries better with the wealth of evidence that scholars of ethnicity and ‘race’ have been collecting on the importance of race/ethnicity as structuring social location and differential and unequal social outcomes.

Within environmental sociology realist critiques of the use of social constructionist approaches abound. This paper challenges features of the realist critique and emphasises the appeal and utility of social constructionist approaches for the study of environmental issues. We start by outlining the criticisms levelled at social constructionism, particularly the claim that the approach amounts to a denial of the existence of environmental problems and provides no contribution to managing them. We argue that this characterisation of ‘extreme’ constructionism is problematic in two senses. First, in that it bears little resemblance to the mild approach actually used in the majority of empirical studies and, secondly, that it is a misleading characterisation of a more radical constructionism. We conclude that the utility of constructionism can be formulated in terms of two distinct approaches. One refrains from making overt moral and political claims, and treats such claims as topics for analysis; such an approach can, however, provide resources for social criticism. Another adopts an overtly political or environmentally motivated stance towards the issues investigated. Underlying these suggestions is our conviction that a particular model of engagement is implicit in many realist critiques and that others are possible, and perhaps, preferable.

This paper evaluates Kieran Healy's recent contribution to the structure–agency debate. Supervenience, I argue, has multiple uses, it entails different ontological perspectives depending on which entities it is applied to and which conditions are placed upon subvening and supervening entities. Healy's use of supervenience is unclear. On the one hand, applied to individual–society relations it does nothing more than restate the trivial truth: no people – no society. On the other hand, if supervenience is to be applied to structure–agent relations the consequence is extreme voluntarism. In either case it simply fails to address Healy's key concern: conceptualising social constraint. I then argue that an alternative way of grasping structural constraint in the present might be to view past-tense ‘activity dependence’ as ‘Cambridge events’.

S. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, £40.00 (£14.95 paperback), xi+312 pp. (ISBN 0-521-65066-6, ISBN 0-521-65915-9)

S. Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class. London: Cassell, 2000, £45 (£19.99 paperback), ix+241 pp. (ISBN 0-3047-0584-9, ISBN 0-3047-0549-7)

A. Milner, Core Cultural Concepts: Class. London: Sage, 1999, £40.00 (£12.99 paperback), ix+198 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-5244-6, ISBN 0-7619-5245-4)

Three books on working-class culture, although unexpected given the preoccupations of Cultural Studies over the past decade and a half, are both welcome and timely. The recent stirrings of a debate about class that emerged after Gordon Brown's criticism of Oxbridge and its exclusion of working-class students were seemingly curtailed by political expediency and the fear of provoking old ghosts. Despite the subsequent silence around the wider discriminations that the episode chosen by Brown alludes to, class continues to haunt British cultural and social life. However, there is now a blatantly obvious lacuna in qualitative work on class, and academics seem particularly squeamish when the subject of the working class is raised.

Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, £45.00 (£14.95 pbk), 378 pp. (ISBN 0-7456-1312-8).

Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, £40.00 (£14.00 pbk), 298 pp. (ISBN 0-691-01132-X).

Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Privatising the Russian Economy, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997, $42.50 ($16.95 pbk), xix+190 pp. (ISBN 0-8014-8396-4).

Annika Thunborg, Public and Non-Profit Interaction: U.S. Assistance to Eastern European Media 1989-1995, Lund: Lund University Press, 1997, SKr 223 pbk, x+271 pp. (ISBN 911-7966-419-9).

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the state socialist system has put an end to a sub-discipline of political science (communist politics), to the study in sociology of an ‘alternative’ framework of industrial society and it has also led to philosophical speculation about the ‘end of history’. In its train the collapse has generated new sets of problems in the field of ‘transitology’. The distinctive features of the transformation of state socialism are that, unlike in the political movement from autocracy to polyarchy characterising southern European states such as Spain and Greece, the structural elite-induced changes under post-communism involve simultaneously transformations of the value system, forms of integration and legitimacy, types of political management and interest articulation and the economic mechanism, including the ownership of property.

In this paper we seek to engage with contemporary environmental debates concerning human–nature relations at the everyday level. Our focus is on the domestic or home garden, which we argue is a significant locale for understanding human–nature relations. Secondary empirical data illustrate the growth of gardening and its connections to changes in housing tenure, consumption patterns and the ‘commodification of nature’ by the garden industry. Primary empirical data on the meanings of home and garden (and gardening activities) are utilised to understand the relations between human agency and contemporary human–nature relations. The findings suggest that a variety of social and economic processes encourage utilitarian and consumerist orderings of nature in gardens. But the meanings of gardens are also structured by personal practices, often reflecting relationships with family and friends, that produce complex and personalised connections with nature that illustrate the ambiguity of human–nature relations.

B. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 2nd edn, xx+566 pp. (ISBN 0-631-21366-X)

B. Turner, Classical Sociology, London: Sage, 1999, xi+291 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-6458-4)

A. Swingewood, A Short History of Sociological Thought, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000, 3rd edn, xi+269 pp. (ISBN 0-333-80199-7)

L. Ray, Theorizing Classical Sociology, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999, ix+218 pp. (ISBN 0-335-19865-1)

The editor of the newly revised Companion to Social Theory describes his volume as an ‘attempt to offer the student a prescriptive and critical, rather than bland and neutral, pathway through the literature’ (Turner 2000:xiv). The rest of the introduction certainly lives up to this promise. In a bold, incisive and sharply worded defence of sociology as a distinct mode of conceptualisation, with a unique object of enquiry – the social – Bryan Turner makes a passionate plea for social theory to engage with the central political issues of our times. Yet as I turned the pages of this skilfully edited, beautifully presented and lavishly referenced collection I grew increasingly uneasy. Then, in the opening of Terry Lovell's chapter on ‘Feminisms of the Second Wave’, I found my disquiet pointedly expressed. She recognises a further aspect of the role of a sociology text for students, the full appreciation of which is missing from several of the volumes under review.

We are grateful to the Editors of Sociology for the opportunity to respond to Dr Sam Pryke's comments on our paper ‘Constructing National Identity’.

We are, of course, pleased that Dr Pryke has taken an interest in our work and by his acknowledgement that empirical enquiry is welcome in a field marked by, in our judgement, excessive theoretical abstraction. He acknowledges in his first paragraph that ‘there has been a tendency ... to assume that national identity is simply conferred to individuals by the nation-state’, and correctly observes that our article ‘seeks to rectify this emphasis’. However, this appreciation that we are simply trying to advocate a more balanced approach vanishes as the Comment goes on. Dr Pryke's comment is inconsistent and internally contradictory.

We should first take the blame for a misunderstanding. On p. 520 of our article we use the phrase ‘We take as our starting points. . .’. Dr Pryke has interpreted ‘starting points’ as meaning ‘prior to the research’, as being theoretical assumptions. The reality is more complex. Our general reading of the literature and such evidence as exists did lead us to the a priori view that national identity could not simply be ‘read off’ from ‘objective’ factors, or taken as imposed from above. For a comment on the author's argument that it can, see below. However, the detailed set of ‘starting points’ (pp. 520–1) are the starting points for our exposition of the argument in the paper, which is derived from close reading and analysis of our empirical evidence. It would have been better to describe them as ‘summary’ points.

David Byrne, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1999, £45.00 (£:15.99 paperback), viii+206 pp. (ISBN 0-415-16296-3)

Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall and Mary E. Lee (eds.), Chaos, Complexity and Sociology: Myths, Models and Theories). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997, £37.00 (£16.99 paperback), xxxii+328pp. (ISBN 0-7619-0890-0 pbk)

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile, 1998, £9.99 paperback, xiii£274pp. (ISBN 1 86197 074 9)

Natural scientists and their lawyers in the philosophy of science, can often be heard to complain that sociologists (and social scientists in general) misunderstand science, their methods are not methodical and their conclusions often unwarranted. Few, however, have actually gone out of their way to present systematic evidence of the failure of social science to live up to the rigour they feel obtains in their own disciplines. An exception was Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, who submitted a spoof paper entitled ‘Trangressing the boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’ to the journal Social Text. This paper, Sokal and Bricmont admit, in Intellectual Impostures, was ‘brimming with absurdities and non sequitors’ (p. 1), but not only was it published, but it was published in a special issue ‘devoted to rebutting the criticisms levelled against post modernism and social constructivism by several distinguished scientists’ (p. 2). The reaction both for and against the value of Sokal's ‘experiment’ was robust, but Sokal had in mind something more specific than simply to show that the social sciences (the humanities and philosophy) were not rigorous. His project was to expose the misunderstandings and pretensions to scientific language and concepts used in these disciplines. This book, initially published in France (the intellectual heartland of ‘post’ critique), continues this project with rigour and relish.

Nadia Abu-Zahra, The Pure and the Powerful: Studies in Contemporary Muslim Society. Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997, £35.00, xx+1320 pp. (ISBN: 0-86372-179-6).

Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. London: Routledge, 1997, £12.99 paperback, xxix+1274 pp. (ISBN: 0-415-14966-5).

Louise Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought. ‘Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £30.00, xv+1198 pp. (ISBN: 0-521-564301).

Sociological understanding of the contours and dynamic of Islamic social structureshas in the second half of the twentieth century been significantly influenced, at least inthe Anglo-Saxon academic world, by the political anthropology of the late ErnestGellner. This intellectual influence was often covert and grudging, but neverthelessreal and widespread. Building on his fieldwork in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, hiscentral ideas were ‘plainly stolen’ (Gellner 1981, p. vii) from Ibn Khaldun, David Hume, Robert Montagne and Edward Evans-Pritchard. On the basis of these stolen notions he created a brilliant, if frequently flawed, view of Islamic structures in Saints of the Atlas (1969), Muslim Society (1981), and Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992).

Recent sociological work suggests that anxieties for, and about, children has helped create the impression that being a child is in itself problematic; or to put it another way, that risk and its management are now central to how we in the West construct childhood. Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to the ‘young sexual abuser’ – a subjectivity, defined by age and sexual risk, which emerged in the late twentieth century. In this article, Foucauldian and sociological thinking are used to help unpack this subjectivity – one which is more commonly understood in terms of psychology ‘the first science of childhood’ (Alanen 1994). In doing so, however, both Foucauldian and sociological theorising about childhood generally are also considered critically. In particular, the absence of a gendered analysis of childhood in some Foucauldian and sociological analyses is viewed as troublesome and it is argued that the question of time in relation to childhood subjectivities needs to be foregrounded. While there is no attempt here to deny the seriousness of sexually abusive behaviours by young people, it is suggested that our understandings of these young people are themselves problematic, based as they are on untidy questions about the nature of childhood and risk rather than on straightforward empirical categories.

Jack Demaine and Harold Entwistle (eds.), Beyond Communitarianism: Citizenship, Politics and Education. London: Macmillan, 1996, £15.99 pbk, ix+216 pp. (ISBN 0-333-67744-7).

Stephen A. Gaetz, Looking Out for the Lads: Community Action and the Provision of Youth Services in an Urban Irish Parish. St John's, Newfoundland: Institute for Social and Economic Research, Memorial University, 1997, no price stated, paperback, xx+236 pp. (ISBN 0-919666-90-6).

Philip Nyden, Anne Figert, Mark Shibley and Darryl Burrows (eds.), Building Community: Social Science in Action, London: Pine Forge Press, 1997, £26.00 pbk, xiv+263 pp. (ISBN 0-8039-9093-6).

Chris Searle, Living Community, Living School. London: The Tufnell Press, 1997, £11.99, xvi+164 pp. (ISBN 1-872767-27-3).

What is ‘community’? This question exercises the four books which form the basis of this review essay and links a disparate collection together. Each text covers substantially different subjects in addressing the relevance of community in diverse settings. Beyond Communitarianism has twelve chapters which explore rights and citizenship in different domains. Living Community, Living School provides a set of sketches which examines how a school in Sheffield, England, draws on its local community to overcome social divisions found in its midst. Looking Out for the Lads contains a detailed case study of a housing estate near Cork in Ireland, which considers at length the difficulties that cause residents in a particular geographic location to feel alienated from those residing in neighbouring streets, despite concerted attempts to bring them together. Building Community illustrates through twenty-six specific examples how research need not be an ‘ivory tower’ activity orientated to the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge and of little use to people who are the subjects of academic study. Embedded within a politics of knowledge framework, it argues for a value-based remit fostering social justice for the social sciences.

In recent times, under the influence of postmodernist thought sociology has largely rejected the idea of social evolution. An exception to this trend is to be found in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas's account of social evolution has received some critical attention, but in sociology wider detail of the picture is not well known. Habermas wishes to hold to the possibility that evolutionary progress can be discerned not only in the sphere of technical control, but also in the sphere of social and moral development. The paper presents Habermas's views on social evoluton within the wider context of his development of critical theory as a ‘reconstructive science’. It suggests that his account has been able to resist many of the standard criticisms of evolutionary theory and that a renewal of interest in this area could provide a rich vein of new sociological knowledge.

This paper draws upon empirical research into the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. This industry is becoming increasingly important as a provider of knowledge and expertise to employers and individuals. We suggest that the literature on new forms of service employment (emotional labour and hybrid forms of work) has neglected to explore well-paid professional employees. We argue that this group is equally implicated in societal pressures to conform to conventional heterosexual images of femininity and masculinity. Pressures to conform do not have to come from management, but from professional bodies, the media and clients. Image consultancy provides one way of encouraging employees to alter their image as the advice can be packaged as independent of the employer and professional. We conclude that the new profession of image consultancy is more about gender than image. Consultants are selling codified knowledge for the construction of particularly socially accepted or preferred forms of bodily identity.

G. Marshall, A. Swift and S. Roberts, Against the Odds: Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, £40.00, paperback £14.99, xiii+265pp. ISBN 0-19-829239-2 pbk and 0-19-829240-6 hbk.

F. Devine, Social Class in America and Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, £16.95 pbk, xi+303 pp. ISBN 0-7486-0666-1.

P. Mahony and C. Zmroczek (eds.), Class Matters: 'Working Class' Women's Perspectives on Social Class. London: Taylor and Francis, 1997, £39.000, paperback £12.95, 210 pp. ISBN 0-7484-0541-0 pbk and ISBN 0-7484-0540-2 hbk.