The article describes the dilemmas raised in conducting a feminist research project with ‘anti-feminist’ women. Drawing on a qualitative study of the perspectives of women in the British moral lobby, the author raises questions about the applicability of the existing feminist methodological literature to research with relatively powerful and potentially hostile women. In particular, a discussion of interview rapport in terms of ‘moments’ of understanding and disjuncture, based on a recognition of the fractured and often contradictory subjectivities of researcher and researched, is presented as a contribution to debates about feminist standpoint research. Concerns about the desirability of research participants as active subjects at all stages of the research process and reflections on the fluctuating nature of power are also presented.

‘Relevance’, ‘accountability’ and ‘users’ are now prominent terms in the policies of public research funding agencies. In countries such as the UK, the funding of research in social science and other subjects has become increasingly dependent on the perception that research will contribute towards the achievement of certain national goals. Despite renewed discussions surrounding the utility of social analysis, these are rarely informed by debates in academic communities about the meaning of ‘relevance’ or associated debates about the status of knowledge. However divergent policy and academic discussions about relevance may appear, they intersect in concerns over the identity of researchers, the practices of research, and the claims made on behalf of research. This article draws on a case study in an attempt to show the difficulties of reconciling competing demands for relevance. Preliminary reflections are offered on a strategy for creating a productive tension between policy and academic discussions.

This paper examines the role and meaning of nostalgia, and its opposite nostophobia, in the contemporary railway industry. It charts the way the past is passively and actively used by organisational actors, management as well as at the political level. It is argued that in the contemporary railway industry history and heritage are selectively annexed, negatively in order to win consent for change, and positively in an attempt to recapture the ‘golden age of railways’ for marketing purposes. The paper makes sense of these processes by deploying a framework derived from various writers on issues connected with nostalgia and the emotional attachment to work.

This paper offers a critique of the argument that the category of ‘work’ is no longer useful in theories of society and suggests that sociology needs to be able to explain why work is not in fact being decommodified, and why the new middle classes appear unable to offer substantive challenge to alienated work and the instrumentalism of modern societies. The central focus of the paper is an examination of the extent to which public service work is subject to processes of rationalisation and degradation. Qualitative data, on the restructuring of local government, illustrates the argument. Senior officers' responses to the double-edged requirement of justifying and implementing reforms, according to a cost-quality rhetoric, are explored. The paper asks to what extent the trust relationship, embodied in the service class contract, is eroded by market principles. It suggests that divisions are emerging within the public service class between the entrepreneurial ‘strategists’ and the welfare professionals. It assesses the extent to which public servants continue to engage critically with processes of rationalisation and suggests that conservatism and defensiveness may be the predominant responses, particularly if expectations raised by devolution and democratic renewal are confounded by intensification and insecurity. In conclusion it contends that ongoing rationalisation and state policies to ‘remoralise work’ suggest that Offe (1985) and others such as Beck (1999) are over-optimistic in forecasting the demise of ‘wage slavery’.

Following debates within this journal regarding the absence of adequate studies of resistance in the contemporary fields of industrial sociology and organisational behaviour, this paper seeks to understand its reasons and consequences. Through an examination of the history of approaches to the study of power and resistance at work, the grounds for this debate are considered and illuminated. The paper then suggests how this debate might be taken forward through developing the ideas of tactics and strategies and episodic and dispositional power.

Numerous studies have noted the lack of change in the sexual division of housework, despite substantial change in factors believed to affect it. According to popular thought, men are at best making selective inroads, such that change is limited to the more enjoyable work. This paper explores how combined educational attainment levels of spouses affect the division of housework, taking into account the relative ‘pleasantness’ of particular tasks. For this purpose 1992/93 Dutch data are used, including a national survey on the enjoyment of routine housework. Our findings stress the relevance of discriminating between different sorts of tasks. Firstly, men, if they contribute, do so more to the preferred tasks of shopping or cooking than to the less enjoyed cleaning or laundry. Generational differences suggest, however, that change towards equalisation permeates all tasks alike. Secondly, the division of each type of housework varies between couples with different educational compositions. The effects of education are such that an explanation based on egalitarian values fares better than one based on human capital. Finally, comparing the spouses, the results indicate that the influence of wives' education dominates. However, among highly educated wives this does not hold true when it comes to cleaning.

This paper introduces the concept of ‘working utopias’ (WUs) and explores their relation to social movements. WUs are used in a variety of ways by social movements, it is argued, and they play a central role in the reproduction and advancement of movements. They reproduce the movement habitus and illusio, extend and reproduce networks, generate new forms of knowledge and practice, and serve, to some extent at least, as ‘proof’ of the validity of movement claims. Two utopias from within radical mental health movements are focused upon in the paper: the Kingsley Hall therapeutic community and the ‘Trieste experiment’. The significance of these working utopias is explored by way of interviews with movement activists who have been involved with them in various ways.

Rosemary Aris, Trade Unions and the Management of Industrial Conflict. London: Macmillan, 1998, £42.50 (£15.99 pbk), vii+201 pp. (ISBN 0-333-65798-5 hbk; 0-333-65799-3 pbk). Huw Beynon and Terry Austrin, Masters and Servants: Class and Patronage in the Making of a Labour Organisation. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998, £12.95, xvii+403 pp. (ISBN 1-85489-001-8 hbk; 1-85489-000-X pbk). These books are both concerned with the historical development of labour organisations. There is overlap in the time periods concerned, with Aris looking at the role of trade unions and the State in the management of industrial conflict in the years 1910–21, and Beynon and Austrin, whilst focusing more sharply on the single case of the Durham miners, covering the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of the 1930s. Here the similarities end and while both books succeed well in their own terms, they contrast greatly in their methodology and ultimately their whole approaches to historical sociology.