Ann Mari Sellerberg

On Modern Confidence

This article builds on Georg Simmels thesis that confidence is a most important synthetic force in modern society Its vitality is strengthened in the urban society based on anonymous relations In the rural society con fidence was based on personal information: in trading, retailer and customer knew each other and whom they could not trust Today confidence is based on non-personal information, on consumer laws, declarations of contents, and various technological devices. The article explores the changing basis of confidence and shows how various cues are used to manage modern confidence.

Family meals and parents’ challenges

Abstract The objective of this study was to evaluate how Swedish parents regard their childrens participation in meals. Taped interviews with sixty-two parents, responsible for meals at home, were transcribed and evaluated. This article is restricted to the twenty-one middle class families in the group. Through analysis of the interviews, we evaluated how middle class parents set out to mediate a certain approach to food and eating. Children were simultaneously expected to learn their own familys eating habits and those of society in general. We found that the parents viewed their childrens participation in meals as an integration process. These data confirm that demarcation, a classic socialization impulse, is used to teach children their familys eating habits. However, the socialization process also includes diversity, to broaden the childs tastes outside the family, and experimentation, to encourage the child to try new dishes and flavors.

'Family money' and 'business money': bankrupt entrepreneurs in a ‘question situation’

This paper addresses the question of bankruptcy and honesty in local contexts, and especially the problem of the bankrupt small businessman in conveying ‘honesty’ to the local community. Studying bankrupt entrepreneurs, the analysis explores a tacit dialogue between the failed businessmen and the small town communities where they live and work. The bankrupts respond to their seemingly mistrustful surroundings by demonstrating their respect for the dividing line between two social categories of money: ‘company money’ and ‘family money’. This discursive resource expresses business ethics and respectability, both essential for the bankrupt entrepreneur to start another business in the local community. The empirical material in the study consists of interviews with 22 businessmen who had created small businesses and experienced at least one bankruptcy, half of them in small towns. The entrepreneurs were found through court records and word of mouth. Interviews were conducted by the author and by graduate students from the Department of Sociology in Lund. All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Fashion, Sociology of

Fashions universal nature does not preclude strong variations in its significance from society to society. As a stratification variable, fashions importance increases in step with economic growth. Simmel sees the ‘need for distinction’ and the ‘need for union’ as preconditions for fashion, with certain societies lacking the necessary motivation. Variations in fashions importance have also been tied to womens standing in society; according to Veblen, their role was to be vicarious consumers and thus vehicles of fashion. There are numerous theories on what drives fashions continuous changes. The theory of social differentiation argues that fashion is based on class, the upper classes abandoning a fashion once it has trickled down to the lower classes. The theory of fashions internal dynamic contends that changes are powered by an Eigendynamik in fashion; Nedelmann develops the idea of the inherently contradictory nature of fashion. The theory that fashion is a manifestation of the expression for other social change is a variant of spirit of the age theory. Different system theories analyze the influence of the different elements of the fashion system. Trickle-down theory has been criticized by system theorists for failing to take into account the complex organizational and marketing structures that mediate fashion. Arguing for a violation of convention theory, Campbell has identified peripheral groups such as bohemians and artists—not the upper class of social differentiation theory—as setting fashion in motion by defying convention. Fashion offers a means of psychological expression, but also a social expression of protest. A number of researchers see distinct cycles in fashion. However, the transient symbols of what is right at a given moment can never be nailed down in advance, making unpredictability the decisive characteristic of fashion.

Social policy and social psychology: "Social welfare interaction" analysed from three theoretical perspectives

The abortion case is here an example. How is a womans abortion intention affected by those means which society offers her? Or more generally: How do the intentions of people fare when confronted with those social institutions which are supposed to be the actual means for their fulfillment? Different perspectives make us observant to very different effects. A mechanistic and a symbolic interactional perspective are applied. A third perspective, a structuralistic one, defining intention as the formation of a tension-state, will make us formally observant. A criss-cross utilization of models may fruitfully break up existent barriers between sociologically and psychologically slanted socialpsychology.

The forest as a taskscape: seeing through the good forest owner’s eyes

ABSTRACT This article is a reanalysis of interviews conducted in 2006 and 2009 with forest owners and their families. It gives a complementary interpretation of the forest owners’ decisions to replant spruce despite strong criticism from the public and from experts. The interviewees’ visual conception of the forest landscape and how they relate to it through their forestry practices is analysed. The results show that the forest owners prefer landscapes that are clean and tidy, showing characteristics indicative of forestry skills. At the same time they remain sensitive to the existence of other value systems among the public. The forest owners’ way of looking at the forest was characterized by the fact that they worked with the landscape; for them the forest is not only a symbolic project linked to identity, but also a taskscape, an imprint of performed work. In the discussion, the forest owners’ aesthetic value system is discussed and a supplementary answer is given to why forest owners refused to heed warnings about the replanting of spruce, a question that earlier studies generally attributed to forest owners’ wish to avoid short-term economic risks.

The contradictory role of the sales assistant: superordination and subordination

The social relationship between sales assistants and customers has often been described as relatively one-sided one in which sales assistants are subordinate to customers. One of the ways in which the subordination of sales assistants is manifested is when customers treat them badly, for instance in the form of verbal and physical abuse. We suggest that these power relations are not one-sided, but consist of both of the normative subordination that has been described in much of the previous research and of organisational superordination over customers. We also suggest that in many instances, difficult customer behaviour is triggered by this inherent contradiction in the role of sales assistants. When sales assistants perform superordinate actions, customers can respond by attempting to undermine the sales assistants’ superordination and restore normative subordination. The empirical data consist of observations and interviews with employees of a large supermarket and two filling stations in southern Sweden.

Book Review: Deborah Chambers New Social Ties

A existence, with the new ties such a life can bring, for example within familial relationships within circles of friends and within local communities – our systems of values rarely leave us indifferent to such things. Yet the issues they raise are empirically elusive. What is the impact of new forms of social relationship spawned by information technology (if indeed they are so very new) on the ties that bind people together? What kinds of relationship stand out among the networks formed by people chatting across vast geographical distances? Down the ages, the family and the local community have invariably been thought of as the heart of our moral world; the recent changes in behaviour have been heralded as the beginning of the end of society, and even the least apprehensive of us occasionally wonders where it will all end. There has been some scholarly discussion of the issues, although the empirical data in some instances is open to criticism, as was the case with David Popenoe’s problematic study (Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies, 1988). The alternative approach, exemplified by Beck and Giddens, dispenses with empirical minutiae in favour of the bigger picture, painted in the broadest of strokes, in which fundamental change transforms marriage and family, and we can see the onset of their final fragmentation and collapse. The great advantage of Deborah Chambers’ work is that she uses a number of empirical studies in combination with the offerings of less empirically inclined theoreticians; she sees things not just in terms of ‘disintegration’ or ‘stability’. She has an empirical and at the same time distinctive approach to the general field of contemporary social connections because she views shifting social and personal ties through the lens of friendship. To Chambers, friendship is ideally suited as a means of exploring a swathe of new social connections within families, neighbourhoods and local communities. The proclaimed aim of the book is to analyse changing ideas about friendship, identity, belonging and communication in Western society. Chambers provides an historical overview of previous attitudes towards belonging. She takes us on a tour of interpretations of the community and the individual, from Aristotle to the Scottish moral philosophers, and on to the classic arguments of Tönnies in 1887 and his contemporaries Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. The customary, indeed all too often unthinking, frame of reference for these theories was a belief that a society of traditional, rural communities was being displaced by anonymous capitalism and competitive individualism in full voice. Chambers charts the evolution of the sociologists’ position as it now stands, starting with the Lynds and the classic studies by Festinger, Schachter and Back in the 1950s, as well as Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), all with their emphasis on the ever-increasing solitude of modern man on his journey towards rootlessness. To one representative of this approach, Chambers accords a whole chapter of telling criticism: Robert Putnam and his work Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). For Putnam, the decline of bowling leagues is a metaphor for a wider social atomization. Chambers is impatient with the vague moral warnings and tenuous implications of this, the conventional view. There is a determination in her work to tease out all the possible ramifications, and a clear feminist ambition. In her view, the relationships that have traditionally been seen as ‘good’, stable and functional are hegemonic, masculine identities rooted in male bonds. Chambers detects a pervasive middle-class perspective in interpretations of friendship. Friendship has usually been seen as a relationship of giving, yet in other social classes and ethnic contexts it had very different meanings and implications. It is important that she tries Book Reviews

Book Reviews : Using the Bodies of the Dead: Legal, Ethical and Organisational Dimensions of Organ Transplantation. Bodwin, Cornwall: MPG Books Ltd., 1998:

At the same time as I was reading Machado’s A book Using the Bodies of the Dead, I was preparing the opposition to a thesis on the dawn of life. The thesis was written by Bredmar (Bredmar, M. 1999. Att go~rdet ovanliga normalt. Varsamhet och medicinska uppgilter i barnmorskors samtal med grnvida kvirmor. Akademisk avhandling. Linkoping Studies in Arts and Science, No. 195) and takes as one of its themes how midwives explain to expectant mothers and fathers what they can see on the ultrasound screen. You see the legs? The head? All the signs of life are pointed out for them. Technology here serves to instruct. Both Bredmar and Machado’s work describes how life, and similarly the lack of life, is today confirmed with the help of technological equipment. Most transplantation services require organs. These are mostly obtained from socalled ’brain-dead’ donors. To this end, the

Book Reviews : Pasi Falk & Colin Campbell (eds.): The Shopping Experience. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Pekka Sulkunen, John Holmwood, Hilary Radner & Gerhard Schulze (eds.): Constructing the New Consumer Society. London: Macmillan Press, 1997

mode of conduct, for ’(c)apitalism now actually produces those human beings it needs to function’ (p. 240). Paradoxes of Modernity is, on the whole, thoroughly researched and clearly written. Schluchter’s analysis of Science as a Vocation is particularly welcome as it offers a detailed account both of the historical context of the speech and the controversy it subsequently caused, as is his analysis of the typology of ethics contained in Politics as a Vocation and in Weber’s sociology of religion, which is far superior to the analyses found elsewhere in the secondary literature. The second half of the book, in which Schluchter reconstructs Weber’s position on Islam and Western Christianity is also a success, for it enhances Weber’s comparative and developmental account of the trajectory of the West, and rightly defends this account against the charge of Eurocentrism. My only criticism of this work is that Schluchter fails to bring the two halves of the book together, and, as a consequence, Weber’s ’political-philosophical’ and ’historical-sociological’ profiles are left isolated from one another. The main problem here is that the book lacks a final chapter to relate these two profiles to the central themes of conduct and culture. There is, admittedly, an epilogue to the book, but it is only very short and focuses on the related questions of action, order, and culture. As a consequence, the book has a rather fragmented feel, and leaves one with a degree of uncertainty as to the purpose of Schluchter’s project.