Peter Halfpenny

The Analysis of Qualitative Data

But immediately a problem arises. Sociology is a pluralistic discipline, characterized by numerous alternative conceptions of theory, explanation and data, that is, by different sodological approaches (or perspectives or orientations or paradigms).* Each different approach has its own conception of what is qualitative about sodal data and what are the problems and possibilities for the analysis of qualitative data.

Economic and Sociological Theories of Individual Charitable Giving: Complementary or Contradictory?

This article first sets out the principles of neoclassical microeconomic analysis and examines the advances in our understanding of individual giving to charitable organizations achieved within this framework of analysis. It then turns to sociology and considers alternative conceptions of sociological analysis, especially rational-action theories and the qualitative tradition. The contribution of these to our understanding of charitable giving is explored. The article concludes that rational-choice sociology can complement economic analyses in two ways but that qualitative sociology is contradictory to the economic approach.

A Social Policy Role for Faith-Based Organisations? Lessons from the UK Jewish Voluntary Sector

After two decades of growing expectations that the UK voluntary (or ‘third’) sector will expand its social policy role, the spotlight is now focusing on specific types of voluntary organisations including community groups, black and minority ethnic associations and ‘faith-based organisations’. This article notes the growing cross-party interest in the UK in religious organisations and then presents findings from two recent empirical studies of the UK Jewish voluntary sector; one on financial resources and the other on governance. We discuss the implications of our findings for a possible expanded social policy role for faith-based organisations in the UK.

Voluntary Organisations and Social Policy: Twenty Years of Change

The immediate origin of this collection of essays was the twentieth anniversary symposium held at the Centre for Voluntary Organisation of the London School of Economics in September 1998. More than thirty voluntary sector researchers from many countries came together over two days to examine the links between third sector organisations and the public policy contexts within which they operate. This volume brings together just a small proportion of the many stimulating papers prepared especially for that event. The papers here have been selected for the perspectives they provide on our theme of ‘change and choice’.

Professional Work and Professional Careers in Manchester's Business and Financial Sector

This paper examines professional work and professional careers and the extent to which professionals face change, uncertainty and risk in their careers. The key issue is whether the power and privilege of the professions is being undermined. It draws on research from Manchesters business and financial sector including accountancy, law, actuarial work and corporate finance. Interviews with senior partners and managers in a range of organisations indicate that important changes in the professions are taking place including diversification, inter-professional competition, organisational change and specialisation. There has also been a change in relationships with clients and an intensification of work. Interviews with junior professionals show that job mobility is high in the early career although most envisaged staying with one organisation for the majority of their careers. Hours of work were long but not necessarily seen as onerous. They were well remunerated in commanding high salaries at a relatively young age with the prospect of greatly enhanced rewards in the future. Few had experiences of redundancy and none of unemployment although the consensus of opinion was that the professions are no longer a job for life. Perceptions of insecurity were greater than experiences of it. It is argued that the privilege and power of the professions can only be understood in the context of the organisations in which they are employed and the political economy in which those organisations operate. Increased economic competitiveness has led to changes in professional work but professionals continue to enjoy advantaged careers in the labour market.

The e-Social Science research agenda

In this paper, we use the experience of the first 5 years of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s National Centre for e-Social Science as a basis for reflecting upon the future development of the e-Social Science research agenda.

Special Issue on e-Social Science

Since the beginning of the new millennium, a worldwide effort has been underway to develop and deploy a new generation of innovative computer-based technologies that, it is argued, are essential to enable advances across all fields of scientific research. These technologies, known as ‘‘the Grid’’ (Foster & Kesselman, 2004) or, increasingly commonly, as ‘‘e-Infrastructure’’ (cyberinfrastructure in the United States), comprise networked, interoperable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate, and manipulate digital data seamlessly across the Internet on a hitherto unrealizable scale. As has been noted by several commentators, more data will be generated in the next 5 years than in the entire history of human endeavor (The E-Science Directors’ Forum Strategy Working Group, 2009). At the same time, the problems faced by society in the 21st century are growing ever more complex and demand research that is bigger in scale, more collaborative, and multidisciplinary. In response to these twin challenges, reports have been commissioned by science policy makers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe to articulate how e-Infrastructure might be harnessed to deliver a new vision for research practice, and there are now several ‘‘roadmaps’’ describing how this vision might be realized (Atkins, 2003; Berman & Brady, 2005; Leenaars et al., 2007; Pothen, n.d.). In 2001, the U.K. Office of Science and Technology launched an e-Science programme, a cross-disciplinary initiative to drive the development of e-Infrastructure and apply it to tackle substantive research problems (Hey & Trefethen, 2004). The U.K. Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) contribution to the e-Science program was to create the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) in 2004. The center has a distributed structure, with a coordinating ‘‘Hub’’ at the University of Manchester and a set of major research ‘‘Nodes’’ at universities across the United Kingdom (see http:// www.ncess.ac.uk for details). The center pursues two strands of research. Through driver projects addressing substantive research questions within particular social science fields, the applications strand draws on unfolding developments in technologies, tools, and services from the U.K. e-Science program and elsewhere and applies them to the particular needs of the social science research community. The social shaping strand aims to understand the social, economic, and other influences on how e-Infrastructure is being developed and used across all the sciences and its implications for scientific practice and research outcomes (Woolgar,

Data sources and estimates of charitable giving in Britain

This paper describes how estimates of individual charitable giving are derived from two major continuous surveys: the Family Expenditure Survey and the Individual Giving Survey. It explores the reasons for and the significance of the differences between the two estimates. Conclusions are drawn on the relative merits and demerits of the two survey datasets, and the circumstances in which it might be appropriate to use each of them.

The Future of Regional Cities in the Information Age: The Impact of Information Technology on Manchester’s Financial and Business Services Sector

Castells identifies two potential consequences of the introduction of information technology into the workplace: dispersal of the workforce and individualization of work, including the spread of teleworking. Such tendencies would undermine one of the rationales for cities: bringing large numbers of people together in order to choreograph their work. Has information technology had the impact that Castells suggests? Evidence from interviews with members of the financial and business services sector in central Manchester is used to test Castells’ claim about the effects of information technology on work and workers.The interviewees reveal that, despite changes in working practices resulting from heavy investment in information technologies, the potency of formal and informal face-to-face interaction to generate cohesion and trust, and maintain competitiveness, encourages firms to locate in the city centre and curtails the attraction of teleworking.

Family and Community Ties in Space and Time

The community studies of the postwar period in British sociological research were an important source of empirical research on people’s everyday lives and how they were structured by class (Crow and Allan 1994; Eldridge 1990; Kent 1981). That is to say, they highlighted the different patterns of sociability among the working and middle-classes. It was found, for example, that in their leisure time members of the working class socialized with family and longstanding friends from their community (Dennis et al. 1956; Stacey 1960). Members of the middle-class, by contrast, socialized with colleagues from their jobs and more recent friends (Bell 1968; Pahl and Pahl 1971). These divergent patterns were the consequence of different migratory practices among the working and middle classes. The working classes usually took manual jobs locally and they could maintain relations with family and friends in the communities in which they lived out their lives. In contrast, the middle classes moved in search of high-level non-manual employment and they had to forgo family and community ties in new cities and towns (Bell 1968; Pahl and Pahl 1971). The working classes were ‘local’ while the middle classes were ‘cosmopolitan’.