4.4 Family meanings matter in family studies Researchers and students of family studies need to pay attention to family meanings because it is not possible to stand outside of such meanings. Thus, it is important to be able to reflect upon the ways in which these meanings shape and impinge upon research, and, in the process, come to be reconstructed and reproduced. Such reflection is relevant whether we are considering the interpretations of people's lives undertaken within qualitative research or the categories of households and relati
4.1 Family and meanings? We have considered the difficulties of pinning down family definitions and meanings. We now ask whether it is indeed important to explore and unravel these complexities. Do the varieties of family meanings – or the meaning of ‘family’ itself – matter, or do they just provide a minor intellectual diversion? You may like to pause here for a moment to consider how you would answer this question for yourself. Do you think they matter, and if so, in what ways? We consider this questi
Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence.This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:
3.1 Photographic content and context Can we analyse photographs to tell us something valid about gender, ethnicity, class and nationality? As the wedding pictures example begins to suggest, there are traces of social facts embedded in the images, as well as evidence of the social conventions and organisational practices that underpin their production and diffusion or circulation. What will be clear is that there is no simple interpretational tool or reading skill available to us that allows us to reduce the picture to a simple f
2.3 A society fascinated by crime? To make an analogy with the now outmoded vinyl record, if ‘the fear of crime’ track is the A-side of this hit record, the track on the B-side is ‘the fascination with crime’. Fascination may seem an unusual word to associate with the pressing social problem of crime, given its harmful and destructive consequences. After all, we often associate being fascinated with being allured or charmed by someone or something. How might such feelings be associated with those fearful things we call
1.3 Summary Modern sport and the media are closely linked in a variety of ways. One area of connection is through big events and sports celebrities. The media also provide routine coverage, scores, results, venue and scheduling details and everyday information, often at speed; for example, through the internet, and satellite and mobile phone technologies. This type of coverage is illustrated by the example of English p
1.2.4 Checklist of common features Is there any on-line help? Can I do a simple search? Can I look at the information in both short and detailed form? Can I choose where in the record I want my search terms to be found? Can I search for phrases? Can I combine search terms? Can I use truncation? Can I use wildcards? Can I do an advanced search? Can I get a list
2.2 Postscript A headline-grabbing weekend of ‘midsummer madness’, when six murders occurred in (parts of) Glasgow over the weekend of 5–6 August 1995, reinforced the ongoing nature of contestation and debate about the issues discussed in the programme. As noted in The Scotsman (8 August 1995), the legacy of the imagery of No Mean City was quickly resurrected by the press – for example, ‘a darker side to that much-vaunted transformation of Glasgow from No Mean City to Culture City’
2.2 The shift from manufacturing to services in industrialised economies There was a profound restructuring of economic activity in ‘older’ industrialised countries in the last quarter of the twentieth century from manufacturing to service activities. There are several reasons for this restructuring. First, the long-established industrialised countries such as Germany, the USA, Japan and the UK have faced increasingly intense competition as more countries have industrialised. Second, productivity, or output per worker, has increased in manufacturing industries
1 Introduction and overview This unit is concerned with the very things that we, as ordinary people, talk about as a consequence of listening to radio, watching television or reading newspapers and magazines: the programmes and articles that constitute media output. We do not (except on rare occasions) experience celebrities face-to-face, as their celebrity is conditional on having their image disseminated far and wide. This unit examines the everyday evidence of celebrity activity – what academic media analyst
Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. This extract is taken from D218: Social policy: welfare, power and diversity, produced by the BBC on behalf of the Open University. © 2007 The Open University.
Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: illustrate how cities can be represented as dangerous places to live; give examples of the place of crime in representations of cities.
6.4 Summary of Section 6 The Labour government introduced a Greater London Authority (Referendum) Bill in 1997. The referendum took place in 1998. A Mayor and Assembly for London were first elected in 2000. At present the eight English regions have a tripartite structure with responsibilities and powers divided in each region between the Government Office for the region (GO), the Regional Development Agency (RDA) and the Regional Chamber (most of which have now ren
3.1 What makes a nation, a state or a nation-state? Why do England, Scotland and Wales take part in the Six Nations rugby championship alongside Italy, Ireland and France? Are they all ‘nations’? What do we mean by calling them ‘nations’? The nation has become one of the most contested concepts of our times. Scholars, politicians and political activists present different definitions of the nation, usually focusing on a variety of cultural, political, psychological, territorial, ethnic and sociological principles. The lack of an agreeme
2.2 Scotland Having enjoyed political independence until 1707, the survival of many of Scotland's institutions – notably its systems of law, religion and education – after Union with England contributed to the preservation of its singular identity. The different way in which Scotland was incorporated into the UK, through a monarchical take-over rather than by conquest (as was the case in Wales and Ireland), may account for the lesser impact the development of the UK exerted on Scottish distinctiveness
Learning outcomes After studying this unit, you should be able to: understand the process of political devolution in the UK; relate this process to both historical developments and to the wider context of contemporary events in Europe; practise the skill of reading, summarising and evaluating academic arguments; engage more actively as a citizen in relevant political debates (especially if you are a citizen of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland!).
3.3 Other disadvantaged groups Information on other disadvantaged groups, such as older workers or people with disabilities, is even harder to come by. The problems faced by older workers in the labour market have become an increasing cause for concern in recent years. The nature of the disadvantage faced by older workers is, however, much harder to uncover and the evidence is often anecdotal. One trend that has become evident during the past three decades is the difficulty older workers have in obtaining any work and, in
3.1 Gender-based disadvantage The post-war period has seen a significant increase in the participation of women in the labour market, with women now making up around 45 per cent of the UK workforce. Although women still undertake the major share of family responsibilities and domestic activities, an increasing number of women are entering the labour market. This increase is evident in many countries and has been associated with an improvement in the relative earnings of women. This trend towards greater equality is eviden
7.2 Adding 2's complement integers The leftmost bit at the start of a 2's complement integer (which represents the presence or absence of the weighting −128) is treated in just the same way as all the other bits in the integers. So the rules given at the start of Section 7.1 for adding unsigned integers can be used. 1 Representing data in computers: introduction A computer is designed to do the following things:
receive data from the outside world;
store that data;
manipulate that data, probably creating and storing more data while doing so;
present data back to the outside world. In the next few sections I am going to examine in more detail the data that a computer receives, stores, manipulates and presents. I
Example 7
