This article explores the social impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). It argues that they are best understood, not as heralding a substantially new ‘information society’, but as significant technologies emerging in but inherently part of late modernity. This argument is developed by examining themes from post-materialism, globalisation and information society theories. It is suggested there are two types of technology, those changing and extending existing processes and those facilitating wholly new activities, and that recent innovations in information and communication technology are rather better construed as the former. By examining empirically questions of identity, inequality, power and change the recent and future impact of ICT's is explored, and it is argued that current trends suggest increasing convergence (economic and organisational as much as technological), differentiation and deregulation.

Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, £30.95, xxi+1098 pp. (ISBN 0-674-81647-1)

Alvin I. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, £16.99 paperback, xiii+407 pp. (ISBN 0-19-823820-7)

Social epistemology versus social ontology

About a dozen years ago I started a journal and wrote a book, both with the name social epistemology (Fuller 1988; Fuller 1996). In the intervening years a few intrepid philosophers and sociologists have tried to map this area, and the two books under review represent two very important, yet very different, efforts from both sides of the disciplinary divide. But before proceeding further, I should say that ‘social epistemology’ is not the only rubric that philosophers and sociologists have used to map a common conceptual space. To be sure, in the days when Popper and Wittgenstein aroused passions, ‘philosophy of the social sciences’ could lay fair claim to that goal. Much of the work of Gouldner, Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu is also easily interpreted as exercises in social epistemology, as each in its own way theorises the place of the knower in the production of social knowledge. However, at the same time, there has been considerable resistance to social epistemology amongst both philosophers and sociologists in Britain. (It is no coincidence that Collins and Goldman are American.) Instead, what may be called social ontology turns out to be the terms in which philosophy and sociology have sought common ground, and much of what today passes for ‘social theory’ – especially that which takes Anthony Giddens as a significant presence – falls under this rubric (Fuller 1995).

S. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, £40.00 (£14.95 paperback), xi+312 pp. (ISBN 0-521-65066-6, ISBN 0-521-65915-9)

S. Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class. London: Cassell, 2000, £45 (£19.99 paperback), ix+241 pp. (ISBN 0-3047-0584-9, ISBN 0-3047-0549-7)

A. Milner, Core Cultural Concepts: Class. London: Sage, 1999, £40.00 (£12.99 paperback), ix+198 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-5244-6, ISBN 0-7619-5245-4)

Three books on working-class culture, although unexpected given the preoccupations of Cultural Studies over the past decade and a half, are both welcome and timely. The recent stirrings of a debate about class that emerged after Gordon Brown's criticism of Oxbridge and its exclusion of working-class students were seemingly curtailed by political expediency and the fear of provoking old ghosts. Despite the subsequent silence around the wider discriminations that the episode chosen by Brown alludes to, class continues to haunt British cultural and social life. However, there is now a blatantly obvious lacuna in qualitative work on class, and academics seem particularly squeamish when the subject of the working class is raised.

This paper argues that notions of the future and social change have been central to the sociological enterprise since its inception. However, sociology developed with the modern project and the rise of nation-states. This is reflected in the way that sociology has consistently taken for granted the geography of the nation-state as a basic organising principle for the understanding of social formations, producing ‘national’ sociologies. Thus, while providing a view of Britain in 2025, this paper also asks questions about the imaginary that constitutes Britain and the ways in which it will be re-visioned as part of the ‘global cosmopolitan society’. This re-visioning is not, however, the preserve of sociology and the paper elaborates popular imaginaries on the future of Britain. A recurring theme within visions of the future is the binary between utopias and dystopias, reframed in relation to the impact of new technologies and discussions of cyberspace. The paper examines the impact of these debates on the sociological imagination and the future of the sociological enterprise.

Ralph Schroeder (ed.), Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, £16.99 paperback, xii+206 pp. (ISBN 0-333-71254-4)

Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, £19.95, x+315 pp. (ISBN 0-691-02949-0)

Sam Whimster (ed.) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, £17.50 paperback, xii+235 pp. (ISBN 0-333-68227-6)

There has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Max Weber over the past twenty years. This may be traced back to the publication of Wolfgang Schluchter's Rise of Western Rationalism (1981) in 1979, and Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1984) in 1981. These landmark publications opened Weber's work to a wide academic audience because they characterised Weber not simply as an historical sociologist, a methodologist or legal theorist, but as a theorist and critic of modernity. Weber's account of the rise, nature and trajectory of modernity has since been addressed in important works by Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (1987), Wilhelm Hennis (1988), Lawrence Scaff (1991), Charles Turner (1992), Bryan Turner (1992), and David Owen (1994), and still constitutes the main point of interest in his work today. There are a number of important reasons for this. First, Weber's account of the modern world offers an alternative to that forwarded by Marxist theory; an alternative which has become increasingly viable since the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s. Secondly, his work emphasises the importance of ideas, beliefs or ‘ideal interests’ alongside material interests for understanding historical change, and fits neatly within the recent cultural turn in sociological theory. Thirdly, his theory of the progressive rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world informs some of the main lines of contemporary social and cultural critique, including Frankfurt School critical theory and certain strands of postmodern theory. For these reasons, amongst others, Weber remains a key figure within the realm of sociological theory, a fact that is confirmed by the rapidly expanding secondary literature on his life and work.