1.12.1 Contestation and power The metaphors of ‘discursive space’ and ‘argumentative texture’ bring a number of points to our attention. First, we can note the emphasis on contestation. There is usually in social life a struggle over how things are to be understood and for that reason it makes sense to talk of a politics of representation. Second, power is at issue here. Social scientists who study discourse have been interested in how people, groups and institutions mobilize meanings. How have some
1.7.1 Footing The practices which make up a speech event or the interaction order can be quite fine grained. In documentary programmes such as Panorama, for instance, interviewers have to be particularly sensitive to the accusation that they are biased, that they are not sufficiently detached or impartial. As Clayman (1992) demonstrates, one way interviewers achieve this while still asking pertinent and provocative questions is through adjusting their footing. The term ‘footing’ again com
1.2.2 Summary The EU-15/25 is a large and prosperous player on the world economic stage. It represents a continental-sized economy, able to compete with the USA and Japan (and China and India, somewhere down the line). The new EU members who joined in 2004, and those lining up to join later, are at a different level of development to the EU-15. This will pose considerable challenges for those managing and governing the n
1 The aspects and meanings of citizenship The issues discussed in this unit are considered in relation to different aspects and meanings of citizenship: people's legal and political status, their rights, opportunities to work, access to welfare, sense of identity and belonging, and practices of the everyday.
Throughout human history people have migrated from their place of birth for different reasons – for example, to seek new ways of surviving, to colonise new lands, to establish new markets for trade, or because they feare
4.1 Introduction Since the ending of the long post-war boom in the early 1970s, the EU has developed in response to intensified competition in global markets, the member states have been progressively ‘pooling’ their sovereignty in economic matters, and globalisation's political consequences have gone furthest in the EU, not least in its regions. There are thus additional, specifically EU, factors in the growth of regionalism. It has been encouraged directly by the EU's regional policies and the regional
3.2 Growth of Europe's regions In the 1960s and 1970s some states, including the UK, contributed to politicising regional economic development by first defining ‘problem regions’ (for example, Central Scotland) and then failing to solve their problems. Here central states were still setting the agenda, but increasingly the lead was taken within the regions themselves, especially in regions with past experience of autonomy or their own nationalist tradition. Nationalism had a ‘bad press’ from the 1930s and 194
9.5 Social work and the law in Scotland In this unit you will be asked to reflect on the meanings of both social work and law. You will find that these concepts are open to a range of possible definitions, and that the functions of social work and law can change depending on the practice context. Their meaning is also affected by the perspective from which they are viewed, for example, the service user's experience of social work and law will not always match the expectations of the professional, or the perceptions of the general p
8.4 A Europe of the regions? What role will the ‘regions’ play in the emerging governance structures of the European Union? This unit examines the rise of the regions and regionalism in Western Europe. You will look at the possible development pathways for Europe: will it become a Federal super-state or a decentralised ‘Europe of the Regions’? The unit discusses the future of Europe, and it looks particularly closely at what may happen to the smaller political units presently existing below the level of the
5.2 The origins of the wars of the three kingdoms From Catholic rebellion to Civil War, what happened during the latter years of the reign of Charles I that caused people to take up arms against their fellow citizens? This unit looks at the background of the wars between England, Scotland and Ireland and how the King's actions led to the rift between royalists and parliamentarians. To access this material click on the unit link below. It leads to a separate OpenLearn unit and will open in a new window.
1.1 What is identity? This unit is about questions of identity. Identity itself seems to be about a question, ‘who am I?’ We are going to focus on three key questions in this section: How are identities formed? How much control do we have in shaping our own identities? Are there particular uncertainties about identity in the contemporary UK? First, we need to think a bit more about what we mean by identity. If id
3.4 Council estates: a symbol of failure? From the earlier extract it is clear that Lynsey Hanley sees estates as a symbol of failure for everyone but particularly for those who live in them. Estate life forms a ‘wall in the head’ (Hanley, 2007, pp. 148–9), a particular state of mind producing a distinctive set of aspirations. These social psychological claims strongly parallel ideas that council estates generate their own subcultures that signal such places as different from others. This is also replicated by some journalists:
1 Aims of the unit The aims of this unit are to: Explore some of the many complex and different ways in which questions of social justice and of inequality come to be seen in terms of the deficient behaviour of different problem populations. In particular, it explores how particular groups of people and particular places come to be identified as ‘problem populations’ and how social welfare and crime concerns intersect in the management of these populations.
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. Figure 2 Co
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3.1 Studying families However, if the concept is so tremendously complex, how then can we study family? Please read the following piece from Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein (1990), where you are introduced to Borg, the extraterrestrial cyborg. 2.2 Responding to the problems Consequently, some academics have increasingly voiced concerns about whether it is possible to define family satisfactorily at all – or, indeed, whether it serves any useful purpose even to try. The extract you will look at in the following activity is taken from an Introduction to a four-volume collection of readings on Family: Critical Concepts in Sociology. In this Introduction, the author seeks to find a way of defining family that will work across the four volumes of readings on 1.3 Exploring values and assumptions As you progress through this unit, we would like you to consider how values and moral assumptions are deeply embedded in family meanings. A central argument of the book is that ‘family’ is a notion which is suffused with values, desires and fears. This results in ‘family’ being a powerful ideal to which we may all react strongly, with regard to both our own lives and the lives of others. It is therefore very rare for people to discuss families without making judgements. Sometimes such Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: Demonstrate a critical understanding of the concept of ’ (knowledge and understanding); Engage with and review debates about selected key concepts relevant to the study of families and personal relationships; Identify connections between concepts and the themes they raise for research and for social policy; Understand some of the social processes underlying research around family issue 1.3 Nick Ut's 1972 Vietnam war photograph 4.6 Agency explanations: rational choice theory The work of the Chicago School, despite the potential pitfalls of participant observation, does demonstrate that if you want to know why people commit crimes it makes sense to ask them. In his memoir of a criminal career in the early twentieth century entitled Jail Journey, Jim Phelan wrote: The robber is a tradesman who, from economics or other motivation, chooses a trade with greater rewards and dangers th 4.3 Structural explanations I: biology There is a long and uneven tradition of claims that the origins of crime and deviance are biological. In the nineteenth century it was claimed, for example, that brain sizes and skull shapes could explain criminal behaviour. This kind of crude biological determinism has long been discredited, but it gave way to a more subtle and notionally scientific model of genetic determinism. In the early twentieth century advocates of eugenics claimed to have created the science of improving
Activity 3
