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.

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.

Life-story interviews carried out in the Czech Republic confirm that the new business elite is dominated by men who had already achieved high managerial positions in the Communist era. More surprisingly, however, they also reveal a marked overrepresentation within this group of descendants of the national bourgeoisie that was expropriated when the Communists came to power in 1948. These ‘buoyant class’ life stories show some of the ways in which children of bourgeois lineage were able to negotiate their way around the Communist regime's ‘class politics’. They also show how bourgeois family lineage can now be used as a resource for averting the potential moral stigma of a Communist-era senior executive career. The ‘buoyant class’ appears to be a self-confident and significant component of the new Czech business elite.

This paper explores the efforts of three social-movement organisations in Vancouver, Canada, to advance oppositional cultures in what Nancy Fraser has termed a ‘post-socialist’ age, marked both by neo-liberal hegemony and by the primacy of cultural recognition over material redistribution in the framing of progressive politics. Based on in-depth interviews with activists in The Centre (a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual community centre), the BC Coalition of People with Disabilities, and End Legislated Poverty, we compare how these organisations frame and pursue three analytically distinct tasks, which we take to be integral to sustaining counter-hegemony: (1) community-building, in the sense of elaborating collective identities and ethical-political frameworks that are oppositional to dominant conceptions; (2) meeting needs of constituents in ways that empower them and prefigure alternative ways of life; and (3) mobilising and engaging in collective action to press for tangible changes in cultural discourses and social relations. The manner in which each group pursues these three tasks defines the horizons of its political project, including the extent to which the project involves ‘affirmative’ (reformist) or ‘transformative’ (radical) strategies of social change. Counter-hegemonic capacities thus depend in part on specific configurations of practice, which we compare across the three organisations.

A significant minority of Westerners believe in reincarnation, even though they do not belong to religions that teach it. What is the relationship of their belief to personal identity? In areas of the world where reincarnation is accepted, one can identify three forms of pre-natal and/or post-mortem identity: the continuing self/soul, the dissolution of the self, and family identity. Comparable concepts within the contemporary West might be labelled modern, postmodern and kin-based. The article considers three forms of evidence from Britain: everyday conversation, the personal stories to be found in Reincarnation International magazine, and an interview study of thirty adults and twenty children. It is concluded that (1) the understanding of A as the reincarnation of close family member B, found in several American and African tribes and in popular Hinduism, may be unusual in Britain; (2) in so far as people play with past identities, this cannot easily be squared with postmodern theories of the self; (3) the past identities constructed bear strong resemblance to current identities, and may be considered part of the modernist project of the self.

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.

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.

The notion of ‘addiction’ appears to present profound and intractable difficulties for contemporary medicine. Using the problem of alcohol addiction as a mediating example, this paper examines some of the sources of these difficulties, and relates these to critiques of the medicalisation of the addictions. It is argued that the difficulty that medicine faces in the case of the ‘addict’ is not that addiction to alcohol has been medicalised, but rather that over a period of two centuries the medicalising project has been only partially successful. Thus medical knowledge and practice have taken as their focus the problem of susceptibility, but made little headway in the domain of conceptualising recovery. In this context, the clinician is forced to divide the susceptible from the culpable in the diagnosis of addiction, and to explain this in terms of the potential for moral self-actualisation on the part of the addict.

This article undertakes a substantial theoretical reorientation of research into the concept of trust. Analysing key passages in the work of Georg Simmel, it is argued that the link between trust bases and a trustful state of expectation is much weaker than is commonly assumed. In particular, Simmel recognises a ‘further element’, a kind of faith, that is required to explain trust and its unique nature. His work has influenced key authors in the field such as Luhmann and Giddens, but the ‘further element’ that concerns the crucial, proverbial leap of trust is still underdeveloped. Hence, the article proceeds to conceptualise trust as a mental process of three elements that further research should embrace: expectation, interpretation and suspension. Expectation is the state (outcome) at the end of the process. It is preceded by the combination of interpretation and suspension. The former concerns the experiencing of reality that provides ‘good reasons’. It is recognised that current trust research already moves away from the rational choice model and allows for affective and abstract (moral) trust bases. However, any form of interpretation is limited and does not inevitably enable expectation. Therefore, an additional element (in line with Simmel) is introduced in this article: suspension. This is the mechanism of bracketing the unknowable, thus making interpretative knowledge momentarily certain. Suspension enables the leap of trust. Functional consequences of trust such as risk-taking, co-operation, relationships or social capital should not be confounded with trust.

This paper draws on data from an on-going ESRC project on choice of higher education. It focuses primarily on the experiences of non-traditional applicants to higher education. Although these students are not typical of the entire university entry cohort, their narratives raise important issues in relation to race, class and higher education choice processes. These ‘success stories’ reveal important causes for concern as well as reasons for celebration. In particular, their experiences of the choice process are qualitatively different from those of their more privileged middle-class counterparts, highlighting key class and racial differences and inequalities.

Based on a content analysis of a hundred heterosexual dating advertisements, the paper, in part, seeks to build upon the findings of previous research emerging mainly from the disciplines of sociobiology and psychology, which shows that when selling the self, men market their financial and occupational resources, whereas women offer physical attractiveness and appealing body shape, consistent with traditional ‘sex-role’ stereotypes and mating selection strategies. The main focus of this paper, however, is on the repetitive and changing meanings of masculinity and femininity. Locating analyses in the context of a postmodern, consumer society, it shows that whilst consumer culture appears to provide men with a wide range of resources for the creation of identities, reflexive self-fashioning is more problematic for women. It argues that although what constitutes a ‘feminine’ identity has now diversified as men and women deal with a novel set of social conditions, women's subjectivities remain more fixed and stable than those of men. It concludes, therefore, that access to cultural resources for identity construction are not equally available to men and women.

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.

How do things come to embody meaning? In much anthropological and sociological writings, things have mainly been considered in two ways: either as commodities or as gifts. Correspondingly, people's relationships to things and to other people seem to fall in two broad categories, often regarded as mutually exclusive: either as impersonal, economic or market relationships with strangers, or as personal gift relationships with intimates, friends or relatives. The ‘social life of things’, however, is more varied. Drawing on Alan Page Fiske's theory of the four fundamental models of human relationship, four ways in which people may relate to each other and to things are distinguished; these models are applied to empirical data from a study on the giving of gifts in the Netherlands. Complications may occur when the parties to the transaction do not share the same frame of mind with respect to each other and to the things that are being transferred. Things may have conflicting social lives.

This paper considers a particular debate in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in the United States regarding ethnic entrepreneurship which has come to be known as the ‘ethnic enclave economy hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, ethnic enterprises and their workers benefit from clustering. The current consensus seems to be that the hypothesis is both redundant and misguided. In denying this critique, this paper draws on Lefebvre's theorisation of space and on industrial cluster and actor network theories to argue that the dominant interpretation of the notion of an enclave has been misconceived. Hence the need is to begin to theorise what ethnic enclave economies really are, beyond the spatial metaphor in which the hypothesis was first grounded, in order to interrogate generative processes of ethnic business formation.

This paper uses data gathered from an ESRC funded research project on social networks, social capital and lifestyle to provide an account of contemporary class identities derived from 178 in-depth interviews carried out in the Manchester area between 1997 and 1999. We use this data to unpack the ambivalent nature of contemporary class identities. We argue that despite the diversity of the sample, a number of common elements characterize people's attitudes to class. People are more hesitant in placing themselves in classes than they are about talking class as a social and political issue. Most people wish to see themselves as ‘outside’ classes. Even so, class is a marker by which people relate their life histories, and most people are aware of class terminology. The major division in our sample is between those with the cultural capital to play reflexively with ideas of class, and those who lack these resources and feel threatened by the implications of relating class to their own personal identities. This latter group are mainly concerned to establish their own ‘ordinariness’, which we read as a defensive device to avoid the politics of being labelled in class terms. Both middle-class and working-class identities can be used to establish ordinariness. We argue that sociologists should not assume that there is any necessary significance in how respondents define their class identity in surveys. We use these findings to take forward debates deriving from Bourdieu regarding class identity.

Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Politics as a Vocation are interpreted in light of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Faust. The significance of Goethe's faith in human striving, the renunciation of wholly contemplative aspirations, and the subsequent undertaking of a specialised vocation are discussed. Following this, the way in which these themes influenced substantive dimensions of Weber's sociology is developed. This explication contends that Goethe's vision of active asceticism, the motivational power of conviction, and a transcendent deed which contributes to the vitality of future generations, influenced Weber's understanding of meaningful and responsible social and political action.

According to Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction, children from middle-class families are advantaged in gaining educational credentials due to their possession of cultural capital. In order to assess this theory, I have developed a broad operationalisation of the concept of cultural capital, and have surveyed pupils on both their own and their parents' cultural capital. I will conclude that cultural capital is transmitted within the home and does have a significant effect on performance in the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations. However, a large, direct effect of social class on attainment remains when cultural capital has been controlled for. Therefore, ‘cultural reproduction’ can provide only a partial explanation of social class differences in educational attainment.

In contrast to recent sociological emphases on the social shaping of technology, this article proposes and illustrates a way of analysing the technological shaping of sociality. Drawing on the concept of affordances (Gibson 1979), the article argues for a recognition of the constraining, as well as enabling, materiality of artefacts. The argument is set in the theoretical context of one of the most recent and comprehensive statements of anti-essentialism (Grint and Woolgar 1997). The position is illustrated through a reinterpretation of some case studies used by proponents of the radical constructivist position.

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.

There has been a well-documented ‘cultural turn’ in social theory. This takes two forms: the ‘epistemological’ case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the ‘historical’ case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society. In this paper I take it that both cases overlap in studies of contemporary society and that the stronger case is justified. I argue that a model of cultural politics is necessary to fully develop the impetus of the ‘cultural turn’ away from structural determinism, and that relations between the state and society should no longer be taken as the central focus of political sociology. I propose that the understanding of politics developed by Foucault in his later work on power and domination can provide the basis of a ‘cultural turn’ in political sociology. Finally, I offer some suggestions about how those working in the field of political sociology are already beginning to develop the theme of cultural politics – albeit without naming it as such – and how this might be extended.