The Sociological Review

This article reflects on the way in which personal ties affect the nature and content of consumption. While it is banal to observe that friends, kin, colleagues and neighbours influence anyone's pattern of consumption, comparatively little work exists on how this process operates. The article will be illustrated by some secondary analysis of the British Household Panel Survey which has a panel of approximately 10,000 people who have been interviewed annually since 1991. It analyses aspects of individual consumption in relation to people's associational involvement and friendship ties. The data is explored in the context of debates about social capital, attempting to apply the concept in order to analyse recreational practices. It is suggested that social capital is a flawed concept and that greater appreciation of the complexity and diversity of network ties is required to understand how personal connections influence consumption.

Drawing on evidence from a recently conducted study of the everyday lives of young people in Manchester, UK, this article considers the place of cars in contemporary youth culture. The article acknowledges the recent beginnings of sociological and social science discussion of cars but concurs with the view that this topic has been much neglected. More specifically the study of young people and personal mobility has been constrained by approaches that emphasise the problematic nature of this phenomena or locate it within a theory of subculture. Taking its cue from recent studies of consumption, this paper offers an alternative theorisation. Refinement of the work on television consumption by Roger Silverstone leads to a discussion of more affluent young people's relationships to cars under three heads: anticipation, use and meaning. It is suggested that car use must be seen in the framework of sociability and networks and that it also critically and suggestively mediates ordinary consumption with imaginative possibilities.

Food assumes enormous importance in prison: for many prisoners it conditions their life in custody and, in many respects, is symbolic of the prison experience. This article explores the complex relationship between gender, food and imprisonment through an analysis of data obtained from in-depth interviews and group discussions conducted in three women's prisons in England. The findings indicate that, in prison, where control is taken away as the prisoner and her body become the objects of external forces, food is experienced not only as part of the disciplinary machinery, but also as a powerful source of pleasure, resistance and rebellion. The implications of such findings for health promotion in the prison context are discussed. Here, the pleasures and consolations of food may well constitute a redefinition of what it is to be healthy in this context, one that challenges the dominant meaning constructed in current health promotional discourse.

Most of the contemporary literature on the neighbourhood comes from US or European sources where there are sharp contrasts with East Asian cities in terms of the physical form, residential densities and in relation to ideas of community and kinship. This paper reports on a study carried out in Hong Kong which was designed to explore the extent to which western preoccupations with neighbourhood resonate in a high rise, high density Chinese city. As a precursor to a larger scale study interviews were carried out with fifteen individuals in three contrasting locations: a New Town estate, an older, inner city area and a middle class housing estate. The interviews explored inter alia neighbourhood perceptions, ideas of community, sense of belonging and sense of place among contemporary Hong Kong residents.

When Yuan Ssu became Confucius' steward he was given nine hundred measures of grain, which he declined. The Master said, ‘Can you not find a use for it in helping the people in your neighbourhood?’ (The Analects, Book VI).

Microbusinesses are embedded in wider social processes, and it is the nature of this social embeddedness that is the principal focus of the article. In particular, ‘domestic embedding’ of petty commerce is crucial, and involves a mixture of competition, domination, negotiation, and custom (Wheelock and Mariussen, 1997). Furthermore, as a socio-economic group, petty traders and producers occupy an ambivalent position in the class structure, as they are vulnerable both to upward and downward social mobility. While the petty capital class has the advantage of possessing property assets, many members lack significant symbolic and cultural assets. Nonetheless, property assets offer the most robust bases for class formation (Savage et al., 1992). In addition, the embedding of petty commerce can be both ‘identity-sensitive’ and ‘identity-neutral’ (Sayer, 1995; 2000; Fraser, 1995). Extra-ethnic factors are significant in this process.

The research uses formal interviews and ‘quasi-ethnographic’ methodology to explore the different contexts in which restaurateurs and market traders operated in Birmingham, UK. The article draws critically on several literatures on industrial organisation, economic sociology, family businesses and minority ethnic businesses. One aim is to give the rather indifferent concept of ‘embedding’ substantive content, and in this way to make an empirically informed contribution to ‘new economic sociology’.

The process of democratization in Turkey is enhanced by both proximity to the European Union's enlargement process and universalistic discourses of personhood rights, and, at the same time, compromised by a nationalistic rejection of global human rights and democratic norms and state-led resistance to political pluralism. One key feature of the democratization process is the way in which contending parties – the Kemalist elite, religious and ethnic minorities, the European Union – attempt to legitimise their claims by appeals to universal principles. The paper examines three sociological/social theory approaches to universalism (Beck, Laclau, Robertson) and demonstrates their usefulness for an understanding of political contestation in contemporary Turkey. It is argued that the work of these theorists allows us to move beyond a simplistic polarisation of the universal and the particular, where the state represents the universal and minorities the particular. The conceptualisation of universalism advanced by Beck, Laclau and Robertson points to the need to understand the processes of democratization within a sociologically informed globalization framework.

The theory of autopoiesis, that is systems that are self-producing or self-constructing, was originally developed to explain the particular nature of living as opposed to non-living entities. It was subsequently enlarged to encompass cognition and language leading to what is known as second-order cybernetics. However, as with earlier biological theories, many authors have tried to extend the domain of the theory to encompass social systems, the most notable being Luhmann. The purpose of this article is to consider critically the extent to which the theory of autopoiesis, as originally defined, can be applied to social systems – that is, whether social systems are autopoietic. And, if it cannot, whether some weaker version might be appropriate.