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This book argues that punk and post-punk, whatever their respective internal stylistic heterogeneity, enjoyed 'sociological reality' in Samuel Gilmore's and Howard Becker's sense. It elaborates the concept of 'music worlds', contrasting it with alternatives from the sociological literature. In particular it contrasts it with the concepts 'subculture', 'scene' and 'field'. The book then outlines a number of concepts which allow us to explore the localised process in which punk took shape in a sociologically rigorous manner. In particular it discusses the concepts of 'critical mass' and 'social networks'. The book also applies these concepts to the London punk world of 1976. It considers how talk about punk migrated from face-to-face networks to mass media networks and the effects of that shift. Continuing the discussion of punk's diffusion and growth, the book considers how punk worlds took shape in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield. In addition, however, the book offers a more technical analysis of the network structures of the post-punk worlds of the three cities. Furthermore, extending this analysis, and combining qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis, the book considers how activities in different local post-punk worlds were themselves linked in a network, constituting a national post-punk world.
simultaneously to sustain processes of differentiation and inclusion. One can imagine states, constitutions, rights, laws, political parties, and representative institutions without substantive democracy. But state legitimacy in most parts of Europe, 80 Critical theory and sociological theory North America, and elsewhere depends on the capacity of the state to reconcile sociological realities with democratic norms of accountability, participation, the division of powers, and full inclusivity without discrimination on the basis of race, health, religion, income, gender
Functional differentiation is introduced as a defining characteristic of modern society and one that is rarely discussed by critical theorists. The result is that there are glaring sociological and explanatory deficits in that literature. Systems theory is very useful for understanding sociological realities such as functional differentiation. However, systems-theoretical orthodoxy often assumes that social systems have to be coded in reductively binary terms such as legal/illegal. Orthodox approaches often suggest that social-systemic coding happens in a-historical and automatic ways. This book therefore adopts a significantly modified version of systems theory. The book also draws on other sources, such as Gramsci and constitutional theory. The version of critical theory that emerges on this basis is clearly distinct from first- and second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory. It is also markedly distinct from a number of other theoretical currents that see themselves as offering critical theories of society following in the steps of the Frankfurt School.
. The policies of the institutions and the aims of the returnees are, however, not primarily based on agricultural activity but on leisure and recreation. 84 J. Martínez Montoya This powerful push towards rural regeneration over the last two decades is the consequence of three sociological realities: (a) the continuing modernisation of the traditional rural project; (b) the reconversion, powered mainly by institutions, of rural space to multifunctional space; and (c) a new sociability linked to a new conception of habitat: ‘neo-rurality’. The villages found in the
artists, audiences and ‘support personnel’ (e.g. managers, promoters, producers, engineers, journalists) who collectively make particular forms of art happen and shape those forms. Art of any kind is ‘collective action’, for Becker, and the sociological study of art is the study of this collective action. Becker’s concept of art worlds is pivotal to this book. It is a central argument of the book that punk and post-punk, whatever their respective internal stylistic heterogeneity, enjoyed ‘sociological reality’ in Gilmore’s and Becker’s sense. And it is a central aim of
specific societies at a particular time. 274 Iseult Honohan and Nathalie Rougier They reconsider the relationship between the categories of intolerance, tolerance and respect, and allow us to draw some broader conclusions on the continuing appropriateness of tolerance as a frame of law, policy and social attitudes. When normative theory and specific sociological realities are brought to bear on one another, questions of tolerance become more complex. It becomes less easy to see tolerance as merely an exercise of power, on the one hand, or as a necessary step
are different and correspond to its specific historical experience. Introduction 5 One of the concluding ACCEPT reports noted also that there is often a gulf between current sociological analysis of diversity in specific contexts – from which the analysis of normative values and principles are often absent – and normative political theory, which has often tended to overlook specific sociological realities and political debates. The authors suggested that these should be brought together: ‘it is necessary to consider normative modalities of acceptance or non
of the splendid positivist isolation to which it had long been confined, to take up its rightful place in the field of sociological inquiry. As the limits of my approach in dissecting a draft administrative and urbanistic law became swiftly apparent, I learned more by comparing the state’s proactive discourse with the sociological reality that it purported to transform. I did not possess the language skills with which to conduct direct fieldwork with members of the cooperatives. Nor did I even have the methodological tools. Two Algerian
other picks up. This is reflected in recent acceptance of multiple nationality. That makes the citizenship binary an uncomfortable fit for sociological realities, and not just because there is more overlap among national communities. The problem is that the underlying attachments are more scalar. You can be in for a little or in for a lot, or somewhere in between. The “genuine links” approach to nationality that sounds in
them from someone else’s tap. Such situations give rise not to increased neighbourliness, but to simple irritation and bad temper. (MassObservation, 1944: 85) Another of Mass-Observation’s studies, on the subject of housing, registered concern about the levels of bad feeling between neighbours, and a failure to recognise the benefits of cooperating with one’s neighbours (Mass-Observation, 1943: 208). Meanwhile, some diagnoses of wartime communitarianism were clearly examples of political wishful thinking, rather than sociological reality. When Richard and Kay