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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The paper raises some problems caused by ‘associational thinking’ in social science by reference to examples from the literature on economic organisation and gender. Associational thinking focuses on common associations between social phenomena, such as the gendering of organisations, without asking counterfactual questions about the status of these relationships, for example, whether organisations are unavoidably gendered or only contingently so. It is argued these questions have been inadequately resolved in the literature, as a consequence of a reluctance to engage in counterfactual reasoning and abstraction, and a neglect of the extent to which systems – as opposed to the lifeworld – are ‘identity-blind’. These questions are pursued through discussions of whether markets and bureaucracies are inherently gendered. It is argued further that associational thinking has also clouded the normative judgements implicit in the critiques of gendered organisations.

Alfred Schutz argues that social scientists should interpret social life from the standpoint of the subjective meanings of ordinary actors, while themselves maintaining a detached, ‘objectifying’ attitude. This defence of the objectifying stance in social research has been criticised by some commentators, notably by Jürgen Habermas, on the grounds that it contradicts the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity and interpretive participation from which Schutz sets out. Habermas in particular argues that validity in social science consists in the pursuit of normative dialogue between researchers and laypeople with a view to ‘consensus’ over beliefs and values. This article disputes any such charge of inconsistency in Schutz by arguing that while social-scientific knowledge may originate from communication in the lifeworld, it cannot itself involve a ‘communicative’ or ‘dialogical’ attitude to the subjects of research.

On the basis of a fourfold typology referring to different definitions of the social-structure concept, and of a critique of Giddens's and Bourdieu's strategies for transcending the divide between objectivist and subjectivist sociologies, this paper argues that rapprochement rather than transcendence is the way to overcome the existing fragmentation and for bringing closer together structural/structuralist and interpretative paradigms in the social sciences.

The past two decades have seen rapid changes in the ways in which sociologists think about children, and a growing cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers in a variety of social science disciplines. This paper builds upon these developments by exploring what three inter-related ways of thinking about spatiality might contribute to the new social studies of childhood. Specifically, we identify the importance of progressive understandings of place in overcoming the split between global and local approaches to childhood; we discuss the ways in which children's identities are constituted in and through particular spaces; and we examine the ways in which our understandings of childhood can shape the meaning of spaces and places. These ideas are illustrated by reference to our current research on children's use of the internet as well as a range of wider studies.

Family lives are an area where people's moral identities are crucially at stake. Yet the significance of dependent children to the work needed to sustain morally adequate adult identities is largely overlooked. Furthermore, the particular situation of divorce or separation and repartnering where children are involved is fundamentally relevant to current sociological debates about the changing nature of marriage and family life. Notions of the pursuit of self-development and couple intimacy clash and create tensions with notions of duty or responsibility to children's needs. Drawing on a study of parents and step-parents, we consider how interviewees' moral understandings were fundamentally shaped by social constructions of the Child and the Adult. Importantly, the presence of dependent children led to an overall key moral imperative concerning the requirement for responsible adults to put the needs of children first. There were, however, strong gender dimensions in the ways in which this moral imperative was played out, and in some tensions with an alternative, but secondary, moral ethic of care of self. We discuss the significance of the Child/Adult construction in relation to theories about the nature of contemporary family obligations and of contemporary morality more generally.

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.

Ralph Schroeder (ed.), Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, £16.99 paperback, xii+206 pp. (ISBN 0-333-71254-4)

Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, £19.95, x+315 pp. (ISBN 0-691-02949-0)

Sam Whimster (ed.) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, £17.50 paperback, xii+235 pp. (ISBN 0-333-68227-6)

There has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Max Weber over the past twenty years. This may be traced back to the publication of Wolfgang Schluchter's Rise of Western Rationalism (1981) in 1979, and Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1984) in 1981. These landmark publications opened Weber's work to a wide academic audience because they characterised Weber not simply as an historical sociologist, a methodologist or legal theorist, but as a theorist and critic of modernity. Weber's account of the rise, nature and trajectory of modernity has since been addressed in important works by Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (1987), Wilhelm Hennis (1988), Lawrence Scaff (1991), Charles Turner (1992), Bryan Turner (1992), and David Owen (1994), and still constitutes the main point of interest in his work today. There are a number of important reasons for this. First, Weber's account of the modern world offers an alternative to that forwarded by Marxist theory; an alternative which has become increasingly viable since the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s. Secondly, his work emphasises the importance of ideas, beliefs or ‘ideal interests’ alongside material interests for understanding historical change, and fits neatly within the recent cultural turn in sociological theory. Thirdly, his theory of the progressive rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world informs some of the main lines of contemporary social and cultural critique, including Frankfurt School critical theory and certain strands of postmodern theory. For these reasons, amongst others, Weber remains a key figure within the realm of sociological theory, a fact that is confirmed by the rapidly expanding secondary literature on his life and work.