Concern is expressed about the demise of rural communities resulting from processes of out-migration of young people and in-migration of newcomers. Youth out-migration is the result of a combination of structural and motivational factors. Here the relationship between agency and structure in explaining migration behaviour is explored through the study of one factor: the development of socio-spatial identities in youth. This is of interest not only as a facet of identity construction in childhood and youth, the product of an internal–external dialectic, but also because it appears to represent, alongside structural factors such as local disadvantage, an important but under-recognised factor influencing migration or staying-on decisions among young people brought up in rural communities. Here, the construction of socio-spatial identities, the respective roles of the community and the individual in processes of inclusion and exclusion, inter-generational processes of social reproduction and, finally, the relationship between identity and migration behaviour are explored through the accounts of young people from the Scottish Borders.

If class theory has explanatory and descriptive power it should be possible to provide evidence that social classes exist as phenomena generic to modern industrial societies. This paper addresses this issue by examining the structure of class situations, as defined by job attributes, in two central European, post-communist societies – Hungary and Poland – and then comparing them with a benchmark Western society, Britain. Classes are identified through a latent structure analysis of job attributes and by assessing the correspondence between the latent classes estimated through this procedure and positions on two alternative indicators of class position – the Goldthorpe class schema and self-rated class identity. The structure of latent classes is found to be generally similar across all three societies, as is the correspondence between these latent classes and positions in the Goldthorpe schema in the two societies in which it is measured, and class identification. The main exceptions to this shared pattern relate to variations in the size and organisation of the agricultural sector and the distinctiveness of ‘intermediate’ class positions. The evidence indicates the presence of a considerable degree of cross-national consistency in the structure of class situations across diverse social and political contexts.

This article emerges from a project that examines the relationship between forms of labour, in the context of managerially directed organisational and cultural change, in a light engineering firm on Tyneside. This material is situated within contemporary and historical accounts of workplace interaction. The paper will address the new emphasis on culture and its manipulation, that is increasingly forming a locus of interest in current literature. Whilst stressing that there is much in these accounts that was common in earlier writing the paper draws out what is distinctive about contemporary concerns.

These issues are developed in the empirical account through an analysis of the manipulation of difference along the axes of gender, age and skill. The findings are located within a wider framework of the shift from post figurative to cofigurative culture. In this view there is a reworking of both the substantive relations between generations and in the form of relationships of age and gender.

The result of this analysis is an account which, whilst stressing the radical change that has taken place nevertheless recognises that even the ‘cleansed culture’ is subject to contradictions stemming from the employment relationship. Further, that within the context of the social reproduction of the workplace, shopfloor experience is chronically implicated in the construction of autonomous cultures. As such the analysis provides a more positive interpretation of resistance to such change than that available in many recent accounts.

This article advances the argument that we are becoming a post-work society, and that the restoration of work-centred society is an irrational and untenable goal. I consider the phenomenon of jobless growth and suggest that the economy’s declining need for labour is underestimated due to the influence of three factors: a statistical dependence on jobs held rather than hours worked; the growth of socially unproductive personal services; and the growth of destructive, defensive and unsustainable forms of production. I show that the decentring of work in people’s lives is a process well under way, and conclude that the ‘crisis’ of work-based society derives not from the scarcity of work, but from a theoretical and practical failure to give the decline of work a human meaning.

This paper reports findings from twenty-six interviews conducted with retired households about the way they make budgeting decisions. The data are presented with three objectives. First, to describe the way that households carry out the process of budgeting. Secondly, to consider the implications for economic and sociological theories of consumption. Thirdly, to construct a framework for understanding budgetary decision making which organises the data usefully and places current theories in a clearer relationship to each other. It is found that personal budgeting has several characteristics which are poorly represented in existing theories of consumption: the strong relation between time and money in decision making, the importance of durable goods, the social rather than rational nature of household decision making and the need for budgeting strategies to deal with uncertainty. A five-level framework is presented which shows how different resources and methods are used by decision makers to manage their money.

In the light of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper begins by reviewing an argument that Western populations no longer recognise any fixed cultural hierarchy and that, instead, individuals seek knowledge of an increasingly wide variety of aesthetically equivalent cultural genres. Contrasting versions of this argument are isolated. Data concerning the frequency of use of different commercial sources of meals and the social characteristics of customers using different types of restaurant in England are examined. An attempt is made to infer the social and symbolic significance of variety of experience and, in particular, of familiarity with diverse ethnic cuisines. The findings are interpreted in terms of the complex role of consumption in personal assurance, communicative competence and social distinction. It is maintained that the pursuit of variety of consumer experience is a feature of particular social groups and that some specific component practices express social distinction.

This paper examines relations between ‘tinkers’, or ‘Travellers’, and settled society in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. It argues that the racialisation and defamation of Travellers then reached new heights with the development of a rural fundamentalist nationalism which fused with Social Darwinism and caused Travellers to be treated as social anachronisms in an increasingly settled and sanitised society. This in turn meant that Travellers were located outside the moral and political structures of the Irish state and placed at the ‘hostile’ end of a continuum running from tradition to modernity. As a result of renewed modernisation through industrialisation in the 1970s through to the 1990s, new strategies of social closure have emerged which are causing Travellers to be located at the outer edges of Irish society. The paper finally suggests that the constant structuring and restructuring of economy and space in Ireland have fostered ‘fortress’ mentalities here. This is aggravating divisions, both at national and local level, between subaltern Travellers and hegemonic sectors in Irish society.

When Charles Booth first published his research on poverty in London in 1886 he became what might have been the first sociological ‘household name’. His findings were widely reported around the world and across newspapers of very different political orientation. As social scientists continue to grapple with the difficulties and rewards of publicity it is worth looking back to this first instance of the political and media uses of social research. In particular, it is worth noting the triangular and reflexive relationship between the researcher, the media, and policy makers.

Mainstream sociological studies of intergenerational social mobility have emphasised social factors such as education and the material and cultural resources of the family of origin as the main influences on the chances and direction of social mobility. Medical sociology in contrast has been more interested in its physical correlates such as height and health status. Data from the West of Scotland Collaborative study allow an examination of the relationship between social mobility and both social and physical factors. Height, education and material circumstances in the family of origin, indexed as the number of siblings, were each independently associated with the chances of both upward and downward social mobility in this dataset. In each case the net effect of this social mobility was to constrain the social distribution of these variables. Any role which these factors may play in indirect health selection, it is argued, cannot account for social class differences in adult health.

The importance of reporting estimates and confidence intervals for statistical analyses has been well publicised in the arena of medical studies for some years now. The requirement to give confidence intervals for the main results of a study has been included in the statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals since the 1980s and methodological points such as this are discussed in the Statistical Notes section of the British Medical Journal. If the use of quantitative methods in British sociology is to be encouraged, as Frank Bechhofer (1996) suggests is needed, it is important to have a forum for the dissemination of basic methodological issues which is accessible to researchers within the discipline. This note aims to achieve such dissemination by using an example from current research to illustrate this fundamental, but often overlooked, aspects of quantitative analysis.

David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (eds.), Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek and London: Altamira, 1997, £39.00, paperback £18.95, 432 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-9188-3).

Rosanna Hertz (ed.), Reflexivity and Voice. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, xviii+1318 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-0383-6).

Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (eds.), Memory, Identity, Com-munity: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, $19.95 paperback, xxxii+1393 pp. (ISBN 0-7914-3323-4).

Deborah E. Reed-Danahay (ed.), Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg, 1997, £34.99, paperback £14.99, xi+1277 pp. (ISBN 1-85973-970-9).

Kim Marie Vaz (ed.), Oral Narrative Research with Black Women. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, x+1262 pp. (ISBN 0-8039-7428-0).

Whether or not you subscribe to the view that the grand narratives of history, modernity and enlightenment are passé, you cannot fail to notice the proliferation of smaller, local narratives. The literature of the social sciences is increasingly populated by a variety of lives, life-histories, auto/biographies, auto-ethnographies and other narratives. Sociologists, anthropologists and others, in increasing numbers, have been turning their attention to the collection and documentation of ‘lives’, including their own. The biographical has taken on a renewed currency, invested with methodological and ethical significance. There is a polyphony of ‘voices’ clamouring for attention. There is, of course, nothing absolutely novel in this. At one time, life-histories and similar documents of life were celebrated as a prime source of sociological data and insight, articulating the intersection between the personal and the social. The career or the life could thus be seen to capture some of the complex relationships between socialisation and social organisation, between process and social order, or between institutions and the person. Having for some time been eclipsed and all but excluded from the methodological canon, the biographical perspective has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. There has been an upsurge of empirical, methodological and reflective writing on biographical approaches to social research. They have received fresh legitimation from a variety of contemporary standpoints — feminist, post-structuralist and postcolonialist among them. Indeed, the celebration of multiple ‘voices’ to be found in much of the literature parallels the multiplicity of epistemological ‘positions’ to be found in contemporary social research. The books under review — and many other in the same genre — reflect those different perspectives, illustrating at once the various opportunities and limitations of contemporary work in this area. In their diversity they also display the extent to which various sub-genres develop in mutual isolation, mirroring specific disciplinary, national and empirical preoccupations. Collectively they embody a number of unresolved tensions in the systematic exploration of social actors' lives, voices and identities.

Nadia Abu-Zahra, The Pure and the Powerful: Studies in Contemporary Muslim Society. Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997, £35.00, xx+1320 pp. (ISBN: 0-86372-179-6).

Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. London: Routledge, 1997, £12.99 paperback, xxix+1274 pp. (ISBN: 0-415-14966-5).

Louise Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought. ‘Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £30.00, xv+1198 pp. (ISBN: 0-521-564301).

Sociological understanding of the contours and dynamic of Islamic social structures has in the second half of the twentieth century been significantly influenced, at least in the Anglo-Saxon academic world, by the political anthropology of the late Ernest Gellner. This intellectual influence was often covert and grudging, but nevertheless real and widespread. Building on his fieldwork in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, his central ideas were ‘plainly stolen’ (Gellner 1981, p. vii) from Ibn Khaldun, David Hume, Robert Montagne and Edward Evans-Pritchard. On the basis of these stolen notions he created a brilliant, if frequently flawed, view of Islamic structures in Saints of the Atlas (1969), Muslim Society (1981), and Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992).