This paper investigates husbands' and wives' perceptions of fairness of the domestic division of labour. Using data from a recent national Australian survey, the paper shows that 59 per cent of women report that the division of labour in the home is fair even though they also report responsibility for the bulk of the work. On the other hand, 68 per cent of men report that the division of household labour is fair. Drawing on Thompson's distributive justice framework, the paper analyses the factors underlying these patterns in relation to perceptions of fairness of childcare and housework. The results show that, for both men and women, the key factor determining perceptions of fairness is the division of tasks between men and women. The amount of time spent on domestic labour is also significant, but is less important than who does what around the home. There is little support for other hypotheses relating to gender role attitudes, time spent in paid work and financial power. The conclusion examines these findings in light of the distributive justice framework and considers their implications for understanding perceptions of fairness in households.

This article is concerned with the status of generalisation in interpretive sociology. The case made is that generalisation is inevitable, desirable and possible. It is held that interpretivism must employ a special kind of generalisation, characterised here as moderatum. However, an acknowledgement that such generalisations can be made must bring us to specify the limits of generalisation in interpretive research. These limits are the limits of interpretivism itself and the paper concludes that this implies the adoption of methodological pluralism in order to realise the full potential of the method.

The papers in this issue were all specially commissioned to mark the turn of the century. Contributors, well-known for their work in particular specialisms, were asked to engage in informed speculation about developments in those aspects of British society which fell within their areas of expertise. They were further encouraged to reflect on what the implications of those developments might be for the discipline of sociology. The topics covered represent those where the editors were successful in persuading colleagues to rise to this challenging brief. They also reflect an editorial decision not to marginalise ethnicity and gender by commissioning separate papers in these areas but instead to encourage all authors to take account of these issues in their reflections. We believe the final result is a stimulating and entertaining collection. The authors have risen to the daunting task of thinking themselves forward a quarter of a century. They have also succeeded in combining careful scholarship with the more risky task of futurology. We hope that, like us, our readers will find their arguments both provocative and timely.

The public/private distinction has been an important, generative but relatively unexplicated and unstable background assumption in sociological thinking. This paper describes some of the significances of this dualism in the context of a contemporary anxiety about the public sphere and a turn to the private, the subjective and the individual, not least for sociology. Popular and materialistic meanings of ‘the private’ are distinguished from possible sociological analytical uses. The increasing sociological interest in various forms of subjectivity is taken to be one characteristic version of the private within the current public/private dualism. A range of well-known formative sociological theorising is described, which provides implicit versions of the relation between the private and the public. These are a resource for rethinking what the private might now refer to in sociology. Three dimensions of the sociological private are proposed – intimate relationships, the self and the unconscious – as marking the sociological terrain of the private now and as directions for research. It is sugguested that the hitherto secondary quality of the private within a sociology which has traditionally privileged the public realm may now be changing and that discourses of the private are affecting the public agenda.

Positional competition for credentials and jobs has been a major focus of sociological inquiry. However, there has been little attempt to examine the impact of economic globalisation on competition for a livelihood. This is an important question for sociological analysis as centre-left Modernisers, including New Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the United States, assume that globalisation has transformed the nature of positional class conflict. They argue that it is now the absolute standards of educational achievement, rather than the relative standing of credential holders within local or national labour markets, which are of primary importance. Drawing on neo-Weberian theories of social closure, this article will argue that the Modernisers' description of the global labour market and its impact on positional class conflict is seriously flawed. It will also be argued that existing theories of social closure are inadequate and need to be developed in terms of what we call Positional Conflict Theory.

The paper examines three aspects of demographic change and conjectures about their wider impact on British society. Two features of fertility behaviour are highlighted. The first deals with ethnic variations and the likely continuation of high fertility rates amongst women of South Asian origin. The second involves the continued bifurcation between career women and those for whom motherhood remains a central life project. International migration is also assessed and the contradictions within the ‘Fortress Britain’ strategy exposed. Britain will continue to receive migrants from overseas and British society will become increasingly multi-ethnic. The paper also examines the tensions between an increasingly ageing population and the development of increased ethnic and cultural diversity. The paper concludes with some implications of these changes for the discipline of sociology itself.

This article argues that Lockwood's piece on social and system integration was quite insightful at the time, but that it failed in correctly solving the issues it raised. More recent versions of the distinction, such as Giddens's and Archer's, are deemed not satisfactory either. Three steps are then taken in order to provide an alternative solution, which tackles the general problem of the relationship between structure and agency.The critical analysis of the notion of ‘emergent properties’, along with those of ‘structure’ and ‘mechanism’, is the groundwork for a discussion of collective causality that substantiates an alternative view which deÞnes social systems as collective subjectivities, including some methodological considerations. A broad notion of realism is upheld in the article.

This paper's purpose is to highlight key sociological issues, that come to light when ‘the body’ becomes a theoretical site in reproductive genetics. By positioning the body as a central feature in this analysis, the paper: (1) describes how a mechanistic view of the body continues to be privileged in this discourse and the effects of this view; (2) examines how reproductive limits are practised on the gendered body through a feminised regime of reproductive asceticism and the discourse on shame; and (3) explores the social effects and limitations of reproductive genetics in relation to disability as a cultural representation of impaired bodies. The central assumptions concerning reproductive genetics are that it appears within surveillance medicine as part of a disciplinary process in society's creation of a genetic moral order, that it is mobilised by experts for the management of reproductive bodies and that it constructs a limited view of the body. Thus, the way reproductive genetics operates tends to hide the fact that what may appear as ‘defective genes’ is a result of a body's interaction not only with the environment but also gendered social practices valorised by difference as well as rigid definitions of health and illness. The research is from a 1995–96 European study of experts interviewed in four countries.

During the last thirty years ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world, but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things – the cash nexus – leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation.

In this paper we explore the development of a new regime in a major bank where total quality management (TQM) has recently been introduced. A number of recent critics have suggested that TQM all but eliminates resistance either through a management regime that removes waste or through the totalising discourse it propagates. We argue that new management innovations associated with TQM and ‘empowerment’ are effective in increasing control over work processes and the subjectivity of staff. Even so, employees are able to retain some control over areas of their working lives. A central concern of the paper is to provide some limited evidence of how an analysis of subjectivity enhances our understanding of both consent and resistance at work.

Nationality and citizenship are frequently confused but analytically distinct concepts. In the context of the United Kingdom they are especially problematic, for state identity (British) and national identities (English, Scottish, Welsh, etc.) have evolved in a highly implicit manner since the state was formed in the eighteenth century. The development of multiculturalism in the second half of the twentieth century adds to this complexity and diversity. At the end of the twentieth century, nation, state and society are increasingly differentiated, presenting particular problems for sociology whose orthodoxies usually treat them as synonymous. Today, fewer societies can be described as ‘nation-states’. On the other hand, the United Kingdom is a multi-national and multi-cultural state in which ethnic and national identities sit uneasily alongside citizenship or state identity. Compared with modern republican states such as the United States or France, as well as Germany, the United Kingdom faces particular challenges to its historically implicit and complex set of political, territorial and ethnic identities.

In the following analysis I will focus on Bakhtin's concept of dialogical plurality, arguing that in spite of his position against the Þnalization of speech and his attack on monologistic, authoritarian unity, his dialogism is itself based on a supposition of wholeness. By insisting on dialogue as a remedy, Bakhtin's dialogism tends to oversimplify the instability and threat inherent in dialogue. The present study explores plurality as dependent on a shift into dialogue. The threshold of entrance and of exit which deÞnes the ‘betweenness’ of dialogue comes out as a rather problematic, torn link. It requires a constant making of a topic and is threatened and informed by forces of coercion, exclusion, break, strangeness and silence. Plurality becomes a critical trope in social theory that focuses on the very threshold of dialogue rather than on either a simpliÞed and smoothed version of the dialogic connection or on an exclusive version that splits between the dialogic and the monologic in an overstated ethics.

This article presents some preliminary results from a historical study of social mobility in Britain and Ireland, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The study is marked by a unique combination of features: (1) it follows families for up to Þve generations, through both maternal and paternal lines; (2) it uses a continuous measure of social position, rather than class categories; (3) this measure is derived from data on social interaction – correspondence analyses of cross-tabulations of the occupations for marriages taking place in the periods 1777–1866 and 1867–1913; (4) each individual's social position is summarised by a work-life trajectory, represented by his social location at ages 20 and 50. The analyses are based on twelve ten-year birth cohorts from 1790–99 to 1900–09. The results indicate a remarkable degree of stability of social processes of reproduction throughout this period, although there is an extremely slow shift towards a weakening of family influence. This process appears to have accelerated for those born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of both educational reform and major change in Britain's industrial organisation.

Qualitative data offer rich insights into the social world, whether alone or in tandem with statistical analysis. However, qualitative data are costly to collect and analyse. Moreover, it is a commonplace that only a portion of the data so labouriously collected is the subject of final analysis and publication. Secondary analysis is a well-established method in quantitative research and is raising its profile in application to qualitative data. It has a particular part to play when research is on sensitive topics and/or hard-to-reach populations, as in the example considered here. This article contributes to discussion of the potential and constraints of secondary analysis of qualitative data by reporting the outcome of the secondary analysis of a key study in the sociology of prison life, Cohen and Taylor's research on the long-term imprisonment of men in maximum security. The article re-visits Cohen and Taylor's original analysis and demonstrates support for an alternative, if complementary, conceptualisation, using archived data from the original study. Among the methodological issues discussed are the recovery of the context of the original fieldwork and the role of secondary analysis in an incremental approach to knowledge production.

This paper addresses two important questions in the area of the division of domestic labour. Firstly, what change is observable in the patterns of men and women's time spent in domestic labour over the past twenty years, when taking into account structural factors such as employment patterns and social class? Secondly, among which groups of the population of couples can change be identified? One of the problems of this area of research has been that relatively few studies have systematically analysed change over time using directly comparable large-scale data. Here I present a detailed examination of the nature and pattern of change in the domestic division of labour among couples in Britain based on nationally representative time-use diary data collected in 1975, 1987 and 1997. The data are drawn from a cross-national data archive held by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex. Notwithstanding the fact that in 1997 women still performed the bulk of domestic work, it is found that, in relation to changes in time use in other areas of life, the increase in men's participation in domestic work (at least as measured in terms of time contributed) should be regarded as significant. In support of this, there had been (i) a reduction in gender inequality in the performance of some of the normatively feminine-associated tasks, (ii) a larger proportional increase in the time contributed to domestic work tasks by men from lower socio-economic strata, to a position of near equality with men from higher socio-economic positions, and (iii) a substantial increase in more ‘egalitarian’ couples.

Trends in absolute rates of both career and intergenerational mobility in Britain since the 1950s are outlined and some of the cultural consequences of the resulting heterogeneity in class composition are briefly considered. It is argued that while supply-side factors – educational attainment, ability, etc. – may determine who has been mobile or not, aggregate rates and changes in aggregate rates are largely dictated by demand-side factors. But current trends in the composition of the working population are necessarily self-limiting. A forecast of the occupational structure in the first half of the twenty-first century together with the assumption of some continuity in the pattern of class advantages, indicates a ‘mobility transition’ in which trends are likely to reverse within the next thirty years or so. The long-run replacement of recruitment heterogeneity by homogeneity of social experience in the enlarged middle class suggests that, in contrast with present-day pluralism, there will emerge the structural conditions for a greater cultural uniformity and the onset of an era of orthodoxy.

This article deals with the claim that Scottish landowners' power is directly related to their status in law, by arguing that it is, in fact, much more to do with their (inter)relationship with particular cultural symbols that can be associated with the land. However, this presents a sociological problem, for the dominant sociological purchase on land is one which routinely interprets it as a social construction. The paper presented here differs, as it focuses on particular cultural symbols which have a socio-historical resonance in relation to land, and makes the argument that they maintain this presence because of their (inter)connection with particular social groupings, notably landowners. Therefore, it is simply not enough to identify landowners' status in law as the root cause of their power, but instead it should be seen as only one facet of it. I conclude by suggesting that just as important is the way in which landowners have appropriated cultural interpretations of the land to forefront their powers.

This critical examination of theories of reflexive modernity with respect to the new human genetics draws on a range of empirical studies and conceptual critiques. In it we explore the ways in which genetic knowledge and testing technologies offer new choices, construct new risks and generate public and professional ambivalence. We contrast this with the processes of ordering, reduction and control suffusing these developments. We argue that reductionism and determinism continue to infuse genetic theories and methods, that scientific and social progress are collapsed anew, and that certitude and surveillance remain powerful guiding principles. Within this context, the reflexive potential of individual choice, personal responsibility and risk estimation is seriously undermined. Indeed, in the case of the new human genetics, it seems that reflexive modernisation promotes, rather than curtails, a new modern/counter-modern eugenics. This occurs through the privatisation of lay ambivalence and professionals' successful institutional reflexivity. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of our reflections for sociology and participatory democracy more broadly.

This paper presents a sociological investigation of instances of a class of claimed paranormal phenomena: the apparent demonstration of paranormal means of cognition by psychic practitioners, such as mediums, psychics, clairvoyants and tarot-card readers. Using a conversation analytic perspective, this paper examines recordings and transcripts of sittings between psychics and members of the public. It describes a linguistic sequence through which (unattributed) information is offered by the psychic, accepted by the sitter and then established as coming from a paranormal source. This form of analysis is located within an emerging social scientific interest to explore ostensibly anomalous human experiences to enrich understanding of everyday behaviour. In this case, it is argued that analysis of the socially organised properties of exchanges in which apparently successful demonstrations of paranormal cognitive abilities are accomplished can contribute to broader debates about the relationship between discourse and cognition.

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.