In this paper we seek to engage with contemporary environmental debates concerning human–nature relations at the everyday level. Our focus is on the domestic or home garden, which we argue is a significant locale for understanding human–nature relations. Secondary empirical data illustrate the growth of gardening and its connections to changes in housing tenure, consumption patterns and the ‘commodification of nature’ by the garden industry. Primary empirical data on the meanings of home and garden (and gardening activities) are utilised to understand the relations between human agency and contemporary human–nature relations. The findings suggest that a variety of social and economic processes encourage utilitarian and consumerist orderings of nature in gardens. But the meanings of gardens are also structured by personal practices, often reflecting relationships with family and friends, that produce complex and personalised connections with nature that illustrate the ambiguity of human–nature relations.

The notion of ‘addiction’ appears to present profound and intractable difficulties for contemporary medicine. Using the problem of alcohol addiction as a mediating example, this paper examines some of the sources of these difficulties, and relates these to critiques of the medicalisation of the addictions. It is argued that the difficulty that medicine faces in the case of the ‘addict’ is not that addiction to alcohol has been medicalised, but rather that over a period of two centuries the medicalising project has been only partially successful. Thus medical knowledge and practice have taken as their focus the problem of susceptibility, but made little headway in the domain of conceptualising recovery. In this context, the clinician is forced to divide the susceptible from the culpable in the diagnosis of addiction, and to explain this in terms of the potential for moral self-actualisation on the part of the addict.

This article undertakes a substantial theoretical reorientation of research into the concept of trust. Analysing key passages in the work of Georg Simmel, it is argued that the link between trust bases and a trustful state of expectation is much weaker than is commonly assumed. In particular, Simmel recognises a ‘further element’, a kind of faith, that is required to explain trust and its unique nature. His work has influenced key authors in the field such as Luhmann and Giddens, but the ‘further element’ that concerns the crucial, proverbial leap of trust is still underdeveloped. Hence, the article proceeds to conceptualise trust as a mental process of three elements that further research should embrace: expectation, interpretation and suspension. Expectation is the state (outcome) at the end of the process. It is preceded by the combination of interpretation and suspension. The former concerns the experiencing of reality that provides ‘good reasons’. It is recognised that current trust research already moves away from the rational choice model and allows for affective and abstract (moral) trust bases. However, any form of interpretation is limited and does not inevitably enable expectation. Therefore, an additional element (in line with Simmel) is introduced in this article: suspension. This is the mechanism of bracketing the unknowable, thus making interpretative knowledge momentarily certain. Suspension enables the leap of trust. Functional consequences of trust such as risk-taking, co-operation, relationships or social capital should not be confounded with trust.

Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Politics as a Vocation are interpreted in light of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Faust. The significance of Goethe's faith in human striving, the renunciation of wholly contemplative aspirations, and the subsequent undertaking of a specialised vocation are discussed. Following this, the way in which these themes influenced substantive dimensions of Weber's sociology is developed. This explication contends that Goethe's vision of active asceticism, the motivational power of conviction, and a transcendent deed which contributes to the vitality of future generations, influenced Weber's understanding of meaningful and responsible social and political action.

In contrast to recent sociological emphases on the social shaping of technology, this article proposes and illustrates a way of analysing the technological shaping of sociality. Drawing on the concept of affordances (Gibson 1979), the article argues for a recognition of the constraining, as well as enabling, materiality of artefacts. The argument is set in the theoretical context of one of the most recent and comprehensive statements of anti-essentialism (Grint and Woolgar 1997). The position is illustrated through a reinterpretation of some case studies used by proponents of the radical constructivist position.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a recent edition of Sociology (34, February 2000), Sara Delamont provides an interesting account of the relationship between the sub-discipline, sociology of education, and parent discipline, sociology. It is refreshingly original because articles which reflect on the relational structure of sociology as a discipline are rare, especially those which focus on sociology of education. That said, I disagree with substantial parts of her characterisation of sociology of education and I believe that some parts of it are so misleading that they need to be corrected.

In brief, she argues that ‘the hooligan is an anomalous beast for sociologists of education, who paradoxically revere him: while the sociology of education is an anomalous beast for the parent discipline, whose practitioners reject and fear it’ (Delamont 2000:95). Essentially, the latter part of her argument amounts to the claim that the wider discipline of sociology has neglected sociology of education. In this respect, Delamont raises some important issues for reflection by sociologists across the discipline. However, my response is concerned with her unsatisfactory characterisation of British sociology of education.

Heine Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen (eds.) 2000. Classical and Modern Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 524 pp. (0-6312-1288-4)

Zygmunt Bauman 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 228 pp. (0-7456-2410-3)

Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli and Frank Webster (eds.) 1999. Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present. London: Sage, 502 pp. (0-7619-5926-2)

Gerard Delanty 2000. Modernity and Postmodernity. London: Sage, 194 pp. (0-7619-5904-1)

Roberta Garner (ed.) 2000. Social Theory: Continuity and Confrontation. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 592 pp. (1-5511-1235-3)

Trevor Noble 2000. Social Theory and Social Change. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 260 pp. (0-3339-1239-X)

There seems something oddly old-fashioned about assessing the contemporaneity of a critical text by the number of women writers that it recognises – but then there are times when only the bluntest of tools will do. I reached this conclusion while searching for a suitable core text for a social theory module. I had two key concerns: to find texts that offered thoughtful accounts of the different ways of theorising the relationship between modernity and postmodernity; and to find texts that would represent the full diversity of social theory. The second has not proved easy, and reading the most recent surveys of the field, one could be forgiven for thinking that gender played a negligible role in the functioning of contemporary society. Supposedly comprehensive surveys of the field, such as Callinicos's Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, manage to nod to such quaintly unreadable figures as Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer, without giving over a single page to feminism, and offer indexes that run on forever without mentioning the work of a single woman writer. What, then, is a good way forward for students?