Publications

Health lifestyles are collective patterns of health risk behaviour that develop within a social habitus. An important area for research is the extent to which health lifestyles become more individualised over time and as people age, or whether health lifestyles remain socially structured. This article presents findings from a Multiple Correspondence Analysis of the British…

Many European countries have experienced a high level of immigration from all parts of the world in the past two decades and the population of visible minority ethnic groups has grown rapidly. Neighbourhoods with a high percentage of minority ethnic groups are expected to be relatively disadvantaged in social and economic terms. The in-movement of…

This paper was presented at the NCRM Oxford Methods Festival (2010) and considers some analytical problems observed within recent innovations in qualitative research; specifically, the use of GPS technology and the various ways in which such spatial data may be represented. The paper is intended as a reminder of the critique of the social sciences…

Recent initiatives for increasing participation in UK elections have yet to replace the traditional method of in-person voting at designated polling stations. Recent research has shown that voter turnout can be sensitive to geographical factors relating to the costs of voting, such as distance travelled to the polling station; government policy has stated that accessibility…

Sustainable development is widely regarded as a necessary principle for the resilience of Europe’s rural regions. However, formulating a strategy for sustainable development involves the careful negotiation of multiple scales of environmental discourse, from the global down to the local. Global environmental issues such as climate change are instrumental in shaping the parameters of regional…

How far have social theorists in Russia engaged with the international academic world since the era dominated by Soviet-style historical materialism? Mainstream theories in sociology and ‘culturology’ use new vocabulary but remain loyal to ideological interpretations of society and culture. A minority of Russian sociologists have translated, adopted and critiqued Western ideas. Works by three…

This chapter defines what is meant by rurality and examines the particular difficulties faced by women experiencing domestic violence within rural areas. It examines the police response to domestic violence, and in particular the services female victims living in rural areas receive. The investigation relied upon documentary analysis of secondary literature and informal interviews with…

Punishing the Poor avers not only that the United States has shifted from the single (welfare) to the double (social-cum-penal) regulation of the poor, but also that the ‘stunted development of American social policy’ skilfully dissected by Piven and Cloward stands in close causal and functional relation to America’s uniquely overgrown and hyperactive penal policy….

In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a…