This article is based on research among beauty therapists in two cities. Therapists saw their work less in terms of what it does to make women look better, more in terms of what it does to make women feel better. They described the treatment as offering stress relief and greater self-confidence, but also described the work they do to manage their own emotions in the salon. Beauty therapy could, therefore, be seen as a form of what Hochschild has called ‘emotional labour’. The authors argue that this claim can be understood ‘as an instance of occupational rhetoric’; the interviewees stressed the emotional work they performed as an argument for a better and more professional perception of beauty therapy than it actually enjoys. But it can also be read as a description of aspects of the labour process in which they are engaged. Like much emotional labour this expenditure of effort on the part of the beauty therapists is not reflected in pay and conditions, being to a large extent socially ‘invisible’ in a highly gendered (but not sexualised) occupation. Therefore the claim to perform emotional labour may be a somewhat risky strategy in terms of developing a ‘professional project’ for beauty therapy.

Early formulations of the social model of disability have been subject to critical amendment by disabled women. Disabled women activists have, however, been equally critical of the failure of mainstream feminism to recognise the disability perspective. This article continues the approach taken by the author in an earlier paper in which she proposed the development of a model which understands the concerns of disabled women as central to both feminism and disability politics. It explores some of the complexities of a feminist agenda for disabled women in the linked arenas of sexuality, reproduction and motherhood, considering the contribution of a disability rights perspective to these core areas of feminist debate. It moves on to examine the potential contribution of a feminist disability perspective to the reconceptualisation of informal caring, where the experience of disabled women might help to untangle some of the dilemmas experienced by both men and women in the critical issues of caring and dependence.

This paper locates labour process theory in broader sociological debates concerned with the action-structure dualism before examining three broad programmes for research that have emerged in response to the question of subjectivity and agency. Whereas the ‘orthodox’ school tends to re-assert the structuralist and economistic features of Marx, the ‘anti-realist’ or deconstructionist position invites the abandonment of analysis that has traditionally been orientated by the polarities of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. We identify and develop a third, ‘hybrid position’, one that is informed by poststructuralist insights but does not neglect or reject established traditions of ‘modern’ sociology and labour process research. Critical examinations of two recent studies of ‘subjectivity and the labour process’ – Mike Sosteric's (1996) case study of a night club and Douglas Ezzy's (1997) paper on ‘good work’ – are undertaken to show how poststructuralist insights may offer an instructive way of understanding how subjectivity is co-implicated in the accomplishment and reproduction of capitalist employment relations.

Social science has long fought shy of the natural sciences. Meanwhile, concerns with the environment, health and the new genetics are creating a need for systematic links to be made between these disciplines. This paper suggests a new way in which social theory can be linked to biology. Recent developments in biology point to the importance of considering organisms in relation to their environment. And work in epidemiology stresses the links between the infant-development, health in later life and the well-being of future generations. Complex combinations of genetically-determined predispositions and capitalist social relations are responsible for important features of contemporary social stratification and well-being. The paper is informed by critical realist epistemology and Marx's theory of the subsumption. Such a fusion leads to a key assertion. Capital tends to modify the powers of human biology in its own image.

This paper argues for a structural definition of oppression as systematic mistreatment. Using the work of Connell and other theorists, I discuss the implications of the proposed definition for the oppression of women and suggest that men, too, are systematically mistreated and therefore oppressed in modern societies. This structural concept of men's oppression is compared with the idea developed in the men's movement of the 1970s that men are oppressed by sex roles, and with more recent discourses of masculinity. I argue that men may have conflicting interests in relation to the gender order. While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many senses benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed by and within it. Since in many ways men's human needs and capacities are not met within the gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent ‘emancipatory interest’ in their transformation.

While various attempts have been made to link nature and society more closely together within environmental sociology, it now appears as though there is a general acceptance of rather traditional divisions between these two domains. Yet ecology specifies that natural and social entities are bound together in complex interrelations. Why then does sociology insist on sifting out the social from the natural? The paper takes this question as its starting point and seeks to identify what environmental sociology might gain and lose from a shift towards ecological thinking. It does so by examining the case of actor-network theory, an approach that, in significant respects, closely approximates a kind of ‘ecological sociology’. Actor-network theory is ‘co-constructionist’: it seeks to identify how relations and entities come into being together. Critics have focused on the problems of co-constructionism: they have argued that human actors generally possess powers of reflection (through language) and that these powers of reflection provide motive forces for action. Thus some form of social analysis is still necessary. Any ecological sociology will thus need to bring these two perspectives together so that humans and non-humans can be considered within the same frame of reference but so the distinctions that generally hold between the two can also be assessed.

This paper draws upon empirical research into the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. This industry is becoming increasingly important as a provider of knowledge and expertise to employers and individuals. We suggest that the literature on new forms of service employment (emotional labour and hybrid forms of work) has neglected to explore well-paid professional employees. We argue that this group is equally implicated in societal pressures to conform to conventional heterosexual images of femininity and masculinity. Pressures to conform do not have to come from management, but from professional bodies, the media and clients. Image consultancy provides one way of encouraging employees to alter their image as the advice can be packaged as independent of the employer and professional. We conclude that the new profession of image consultancy is more about gender than image. Consultants are selling codified knowledge for the construction of particularly socially accepted or preferred forms of bodily identity.

This study analyses three recurrent themes in the presidential addresses read at the American Sociological Association (ASA) annual meetings, 1906–98. First, most ASA presidential addresses reflected a pride in democracy and equality – a spirit that positions America as leader of the world both socially and morally. The second theme was race conflict. ASA presidents frequently discussed the question of equal rights for ‘African-Americans’, suggesting that racial and social barriers encouraged social fragility and instability. Ensuing racial riots and protests were referred to as indications of such social problems, which American society (and sociology) failed either to recognise or to solve. Finally, ASA presidents were preoccupied with the theme of social change and its unpredictability in America. Based on this analysis, we argue that the constitutional premises of American democracy have allowed for both protests and the enlargement of political arenas and boundaries, and have systematically dissolved political issues and metamorphosed them into social issues.

The article looks at some strengths and weaknesses of attempts at socialising the concepts of knowledge and epistemology. Roughly speaking, such socialising is the result of considering these concepts from the sociological point of view. Four consequences of doing so are pointed out. This is followed by a discussion of a number of flaws identified in much of the constructivist literature on the issue. Constructivists have doubtless played an important role in demystifying the notions of knowledge and epistemology. Yet at times they have gone too far by drawing conclusions from their analyses which these analyses are incapable of supporting. At the end of the article, an alternative avoiding the difficulties posed by such conclusions is briefly sketched.

Visual methods such as photography are under-used in the active process of sociological research. As rare as visual methods are, it is even rarer for the resultant images to be made by rather than of research participants. Primarily, the paper explores the challenges and contradictions of using photography within a multi-method approach. We consider processes for analysing visual data, different ways of utilising visual methods in sociological research, and the use of primary and secondary data, or, simple illustration versus active visual exploration of the social. The question of triangulation of visual data against text and testimony versus a stand-alone approach is explored in depth.

Though increasingly a focus of both political concern and academic research, ‘sex tourism’ is a difficult term to define. This article presents both quantitative and qualitative data on the sexual behaviour and attitudes of single and/or unaccompanied heterosexual female tourists in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. In so doing it aims to contribute to the body of research evidence on the phenomenon, as well as to highlight some of the conceptual problems associated with existing analyses of both ‘sex tourism’ and ‘romance tourism’. It calls for the development of a theoretical model of sex tourism which can accommodate both the diversity of tourist-related sexual-economic exchanges which take place in economically underdeveloped countries and the complexity of the power relations that underpin them.

In a recent article in this journal, Andrew Sayer has argued that much feminist research on the gendered nature of organisations, such as bureaucracy and the market, confuses a contingent association of gender and organisational forms with a stronger claim that they are intrinsically gendered. Sayer accepts that this research has shown that the empirically found, concrete forms of organisations are gendered. However, deeper theoretical reflection, he suggests, reveals that, when considered as ‘abstract realist models’, bureaucracy and the market are, in fact, identity-blind. He makes two claims, one concerned with explanation, the other concerned with the political consequences of social inquiry. The first is that the construction of abstract models, rather than the ‘associational’ thinking concerned with the delineation of empirical regularities, is necessary to the proper understanding of the operation of causal mechanisms and their mode of determination in social life. The second is that this will enable a more progressive and positive politics beyond a fatalism which he attributes to associational thinking. This paper takes issue with both claims arguing that the abstract theory he defends has no positive role in social inquiry and that his political critique is misplaced.

My article was a critique of what I termed associational thinking, illustrated by reference to examples concerning markets, bureaucracy and gender. I counterposed associational thinking, with its suspicion of abstraction, to counterfactual thinking, which is concerned not with what things happen to be associated together but with which social objects necessarily depend on one another and which do not. While it is clearly vitally important to know how social objects are associated with one another, and what consequences flow from this, it is also important – for practical and political, as well as academic, reasons – to know whether they have to be associated thus, or whether things could be otherwise. Thus, in response to phenomena which are widely found in association, such as capitalism and various forms of gender order, the counterfactual questions would be: is each a necessary condition of the existence of the other, or could one exist without the other? As a second theme of the paper, I argued that a modified version of the distinction between system and lifeworld was useful in understanding the particular associations under discussion.

Recent sociological work suggests that anxieties for, and about, children has helped create the impression that being a child is in itself problematic; or to put it another way, that risk and its management are now central to how we in the West construct childhood. Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to the ‘young sexual abuser’ – a subjectivity, defined by age and sexual risk, which emerged in the late twentieth century. In this article, Foucauldian and sociological thinking are used to help unpack this subjectivity – one which is more commonly understood in terms of psychology ‘the first science of childhood’ (Alanen 1994). In doing so, however, both Foucauldian and sociological theorising about childhood generally are also considered critically. In particular, the absence of a gendered analysis of childhood in some Foucauldian and sociological analyses is viewed as troublesome and it is argued that the question of time in relation to childhood subjectivities needs to be foregrounded. While there is no attempt here to deny the seriousness of sexually abusive behaviours by young people, it is suggested that our understandings of these young people are themselves problematic, based as they are on untidy questions about the nature of childhood and risk rather than on straightforward empirical categories.

In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as ‘the private’. In this he seeks to use ‘the private’ for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead on recent writings by some prominent male sociological theorists. Most significantly, he subsumes family life within his category of intimacy, but this may obliterate some ideas about ‘families’. Furthermore, parent–child relationships are about a great deal more than intimacy, not least because there are real issues of power involved. Our own concerns with the concepts of public and private have been to illuminate different ways of being that are associated with different sorts of social spaces. We outline four main tensions that may become overlaid to create extensive differences in ways of being, including a tension around differing understandings of the individual. In particular, we point out the significance of childhood and children in these tensions around public and private social spaces, and their associated practices and orientations.

This paper evaluates Kieran Healy's recent contribution to the structure–agency debate. Supervenience, I argue, has multiple uses, it entails different ontological perspectives depending on which entities it is applied to and which conditions are placed upon subvening and supervening entities. Healy's use of supervenience is unclear. On the one hand, applied to individual–society relations it does nothing more than restate the trivial truth: no people – no society. On the other hand, if supervenience is to be applied to structure–agent relations the consequence is extreme voluntarism. In either case it simply fails to address Healy's key concern: conceptualising social constraint. I then argue that an alternative way of grasping structural constraint in the present might be to view past-tense ‘activity dependence’ as ‘Cambridge events’.

Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, £14.99 paperback, vii+379 pp. (ISBN 0-333-60081-8)

Stephen May (ed.), Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. London: Falmer Press, 1999, £16.99 paperback, vii+296 pp. (ISBN 0-7507-0767-4)

Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (eds.), Multicultural Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, iv+267 pp. (ISBN 0-19-829610-X)

Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London: Zed Press, 2000, £15.95 paperback, x+262 pp. (ISBN 1-95649-559-4)

Long recognized as a signifier of difficult matters of policy and schooling, multiculturalism as an idea did not really take hold, in Britain at least, until the 1990s. The ‘cultural turn’ in social theory has helped underscore the second half of the multicultural label, whilst the overwhelmingly pluralist cast of contemporary thought has affirmed the ‘multi’ part. Accordingly, multiculturalism has resisted subsumption under apparently more singular and materialist projects such as anti-racism, political economy and radical postcoloniality. Yet until recently there have been few systematic attempts to articulate and defend the idea of multiculturalism, or to work out its full consequences for concrete understanding. The books under review are important contributions to the development of multiculturalist theory and research, sharpening our sense of multiculturalism's analytical and political reach - its ‘problematic’. Above all, and in strikingly different ways, these volumes wrestle with the taxing overarching issue of whether ‘multiculturalism’ can stand not only as an appropriate descriptive encapsulation of contemporary social diversity, but also as a fully-fledged theoretical and evaluative perspective.

In recent times, under the influence of postmodernist thought sociology has largely rejected the idea of social evolution. An exception to this trend is to be found in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas's account of social evolution has received some critical attention, but in sociology wider detail of the picture is not well known. Habermas wishes to hold to the possibility that evolutionary progress can be discerned not only in the sphere of technical control, but also in the sphere of social and moral development. The paper presents Habermas's views on social evoluton within the wider context of his development of critical theory as a ‘reconstructive science’. It suggests that his account has been able to resist many of the standard criticisms of evolutionary theory and that a renewal of interest in this area could provide a rich vein of new sociological knowledge.

Colin Coulter, Contemporary Northern Irish Society: An Introduction, London: Pluto Press, 1999, £45.00 (£14.99 pbk), 286 pp. (ISBN 0-7453-1244-6)

Graham Ellison and Jim Smyth, The Crowned Harp: Policing Northern Ireland, London: Pluto Press, 2000, £45.00 (£14.99 pbk), xix+218 pp. (ISBN 0-7453-1393-0)

Eamonn Slater and Michel Peillon (eds.), Memories of the Present: A Sociological Chronicle of Ireland 1997-1998, Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2000, IR£19.00, 268 pp. (ISBN 1-9024-4829-4)

Two common-sense phrases, widely used in everyday language, sum up the sociological paradox of Northern Ireland – ‘unless you're from the place you can't begin to understand it’, and ‘anyone who isn't confused here doesn't know what's going on’. That is, Northern Ireland is believed to be both unique and unintelligible. This is paradoxical for two reasons. Sociologists have long sought to render Northern Ireland intelligible and to locate it in a comparative framework with similar societies elsewhere. They have done so to the point where, along with other social scientists, they have made it one of the world's most researched societies. In his book on contemporary Northern Irish society, Coulter describes it as proportionately the most studied place on the planet.

It is widely assumed that children, especially younger children and those in poorer circumstances, are unreliable informants of parental occupation and related characteristics, thereby precluding the measurement of social class in much research involving children. In a comparison of reports of parental economic activity and occupation by 11 year olds and their parents in the West of Scotland 11 to 16 Study, the assumption is found to be unwarranted. This school-based study, which used a ‘mini-interview’ to question children about parental characteristics, found lower levels of missing data among children compared to parents and ‘(very) good’ levels of agreement (as indicated by the Kappa statistic) about both economic activity and occupation. These results, which were similar for boys and girls and those in different material and family circumstances, also suggest that children may sometimes provide more valid reports than parents themselves. Under particular fieldwork conditions, therefore, children as young as 11 from diverse social backgrounds can provide reliable, and possibly very valid, reports of parental socio-economic characteristics. With few additional resources, most studies of child only informants could reproduce that study's fieldwork procedures to obtain good data on social class.