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
5 Conclusion Photographs can be used as documentary data in the social sciences. Although they may seem to have a special relation to the events they depict, the social processes of image construction must be considered when we look at photographs as documents. Photographs are depictions of what took place, but are produced through a series of operations that must be understood in terms of their social organisation. Only by understanding these operations, their social, economic, political and psycho
4.2 Nation and identity Yet even if photographs are an ‘evidential trace’ of the reality they depict, they are far from perfect in this respect. Because a photograph could always have been made differently it cannot be ‘the whole truth’ about something (Becker, 1985, p. 101). If we think about photographs designed to inform (i.e. rather than art photographs in which questions of truth or reality are really not at issue) it will be obvious that the photographer's choices have determined what sort of ‘eviden
4.1 Are photographs truthful? In this unit, we've looked at several examples of the social processes of identity construction and a number of dimensions of identity. Our discussion has indicated that we cannot try to understand the role of images through one approach alone, but need to utilise both content and context analyses. It makes sense to ask whether the same sort of approaches can be applied to other types of image. How should we analyse ‘factual’ images which deal with social issues such as thos
Looking at the family: the 1950s Family photographs may be taken as records, for advertising purposes, or indeed as mementos. Now look at an example drawn from the 1950s (Author(s): 2.2 Theories, documents and knowledge Documentary evidence is often messy and inconsistent, and even where it seems to be ‘factual’ (for example in the form of official records) its precise meaning in terms of wider social processes is far from clear. There is uncertainty about what it means, as well as the representation of uncertainty and diversity in the images. In every case, the meaning of the evidence is dependent on interpretation, that is, the part of the theory we employ to understand what is going on. 3.5 Evaluating claims, using evidence Where does this exploration of evidence lead us? Can we decisively confirm or refute the common-sense stories of the crime problem in the UK? Through an investigation of quantitative statistical evidence we certainly have some support for the claim that crime has risen considerably. But there are also doubts. The official statistics do not reflect unrecorded crime, and as one probes more deeply into the statistics we find that only certain types of crime have been on the rise. In any ca 3.1 Claims about crime Definitions beg questions. So do social narratives and stories. Again, we need, as social scientists, to begin with an analytical task. What are the key claims that are being made in the common-sense story of the problem of crime? What are the core arguments that hold the whole thing together? There are a number of these, but two seem to be particularly important.
Claim 1: UK society in the immediate 2.2 A society frightened by crime? We do not have to look too far to find someone saying that the UK is a society gripped by rising levels of crime, anti-social behaviour and incivility; or that disorder threatens social stability. The criminologist Robert Reiner suggests that ‘in the last 40 years, we have got used to thinking of crime, like the weather and pop music, as something that is always getting worse’ (Reiner, 1996, p. 3). So who is telling this story? Most of us will have heard older family members and fri 1.2 The recognition and pursuit of crime Whatever crime might mean, it can still land you in trouble. So given our answers to the questionnaire, why aren't we doing time at Her Majesty's Pleasure, or paying off an enormous backlog of fines? Not only the meaning of crime, but also the transformation of a potentially criminal act into conviction and imprisonment, is an irreducibly social process. 1.1 The meaning of crime What is a crime? Good question, but how to go about answering it? For most of us, most of the time, crime is something other people do. So why not check that against personal experience? Have a go at the questionnaire below, Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: give a definition of crime (in terms of society); state the steps and factors that lead from a crime to conviction; illustrate how society views crime ‘with fear and fascination’; give examples of the relationship between crime rates and the evidence to support these claims. 4 Conclusion Since its invention, modern sport has been closely linked to the mass media as a central part of popular culture. The media have expanded the reach of sports audiences and helped populate and enrich professional sport. Sport provides exciting content for the media through comprehensible narratives and modern heroes and celebrities. The media are selective in their coverage of sport, demonstrating inequaliti 3.1 Shining examples Sport, it should be clear by now, has a symbiotic relationship with the media. Newspapers, radio and television have enlarged the audience for sports and greatly enriched the enjoyment that can be gained from following sport. Sport provides the media with copy and content along with readers, viewers and customers. Why does sport provide such good content and in such quantities for every sort of media? What is the public getting and what is it that the public likes? Sport provides many pleasur 2.1 Introduction In this section, we explore how experiences of being an older person in the nineteenth century were constituted through the operation of the 1834 New Poor Law Act and the processes of industrial change that ran parallel to it. We examine the way this constructed the lives of older people as ‘other’ to the emergent ‘normal’ (adult, relatively youthful, male paid worker) and trace its legacy to reveal points of continuity and change. 2.2 Market demand and price This subsection will explore the widely observed relationship between the quantity demanded of a good by consumers and the price of the good: the lower the price, the greater the quantity demanded. This relationship underlies the way in which falling prices are responsible for the rapid take-up of new products by consumers, as reported in the quotations above. We focus on the market demand curve, which represents the demand of all the consumers in a given market. However, as well as the price 5 Conclusion This chapter has enabled you to think about the essential role of technological change in determining economy-wide growth and the growth of firms and industries. We have seen that many issues surrounding the new economy are really issues around the dynamics of technological change: rapid increases in productivity, the emergence of many small firms, new products and new processes, and so on. The main lesson of the unit has been to provide a historical perspective to the introduction of new tec 3.2 Is productivity sustainable? Are the recent increases in productivity sustainable? The answer to this question, and the crux of the debate concerning the effect of IT, centres on distinguishing whether recent increases in productivity are just cyclical, and hence temporary, or whether they are the beginning of a new and long-lasting trend. If the increase in productivity in the USA in the late 1990s was cyclical, this means that it occurred simply because the US economy as a whole was undergoing a bo Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: identify criteria to evaluate the politics of racial violence.
Activity 4
Activity 1
