This paper explores the efforts of three social-movement organisations in Vancouver, Canada, to advance oppositional cultures in what Nancy Fraser has termed a ‘post-socialist’ age, marked both by neo-liberal hegemony and by the primacy of cultural recognition over material redistribution in the framing of progressive politics. Based on in-depth interviews with activists in The Centre (a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual community centre), the BC Coalition of People with Disabilities, and End Legislated Poverty, we compare how these organisations frame and pursue three analytically distinct tasks, which we take to be integral to sustaining counter-hegemony: (1) community-building, in the sense of elaborating collective identities and ethical-political frameworks that are oppositional to dominant conceptions; (2) meeting needs of constituents in ways that empower them and prefigure alternative ways of life; and (3) mobilising and engaging in collective action to press for tangible changes in cultural discourses and social relations. The manner in which each group pursues these three tasks defines the horizons of its political project, including the extent to which the project involves ‘affirmative’ (reformist) or ‘transformative’ (radical) strategies of social change. Counter-hegemonic capacities thus depend in part on specific configurations of practice, which we compare across the three organisations.

This paper focuses on the cultural and social consequences of the new forms of work organisation variously described as engineered workplace culture, flexibilisation, teamwork, employee involvement, quality circles and post-Fordism. Some celebrate the new form of worker this creates as a consumer of organisationally provided meanings. However, the choices are quite limited for workers in engineered cultures, and for the self-discovering subjects of consumer capitalism more generally. The language, norms and values of engineered cultures become internalised and dominate employees' subjectivity. Further, a sociological analysis of institutional structures of consumer capitalism, and engineered cultures in particular, points to how they encourage workers to develop moral frameworks that are individualistic, with little concern for other people. Simone Weil's studies of the workplace are used to argue that a culture that encourages an ethical orientation of respect for the other is at the heart of good work.

One of the central ways in which institutional racism is perpetuated is through the designation of the somatic norm. However, although the classed and gendered nature of the somatic norm underlying somataphobic representations of the universal ‘individual’ have been both theoretically and substantially explored, the racial character of this embodied being has received scant attention. This paper introduces race to the wider debates on the embodied nature of the political ‘individual’, before analysing the specific ways in which an institution that is deemed to be at the absolute apex of disembodied, neutral professionalism – the British senior civil service – is naturalised as the domain for white men. The somatic norm underlying the representation of the impartial senior civil service is brought to the fore in this paper by discussing the location of black senior civil servants, whose presence helps us to highlight the synchronic relationship between racialised bodies and elite spaces in the body politic. These ‘Space Invaders’ disturb the racialised nature of these spaces whilst at the same time adhering to the assimilative pressure of the somatic norm. An engagement with the interview accounts of black senior civil servants allows us to grasp some idea of what it is like for them to coexist in a place that is built on a ‘racial contract’ which has demarcated spaces in accordance with racialised corporealities. As matter out of place these ‘different’ bodies generate disorientation, undergo the burden of invisibility and abide by the racialised and classed informal rules of behaviour, particularly those of the legitimate language. All of which problematises the notion of ‘difference’ in organisations as entailing much more than the mere existence of ‘different’ bodies, on the basis of race or gender.

This paper considers a particular debate in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in the United States regarding ethnic entrepreneurship which has come to be known as the ‘ethnic enclave economy hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, ethnic enterprises and their workers benefit from clustering. The current consensus seems to be that the hypothesis is both redundant and misguided. In denying this critique, this paper draws on Lefebvre's theorisation of space and on industrial cluster and actor network theories to argue that the dominant interpretation of the notion of an enclave has been misconceived. Hence the need is to begin to theorise what ethnic enclave economies really are, beyond the spatial metaphor in which the hypothesis was first grounded, in order to interrogate generative processes of ethnic business formation.

Based on interviews with 122 men who had used violence against their partner, and employing Goffman's (1971) concept of ‘remedial work’, this paper interrogates violent men's perceptions, constructions and understandings of domestic violence and their responses to its use. Accounts of women partners are also examined. ‘Remedial work’ involves the perpetrator of an act of untoward behaviour in various forms of ‘damage limitation’ intended to change the meaning of the offensive act into one that is deemed acceptable. Goffman's three related devices of remedial work – ‘accounts, apologies, and requests’ – are used to explore men's narratives of violent events, their definitions of the event, rationales and perceptions of consequences. Revealed are the exculpatory and expiatory discourses which dominate men's narratives and which expose the purposeful yet paradoxical nature of their responses to violence, directed at mitigating and obfuscating culpability while at the same time seeking forgiveness and absolution. We suggest that through these devices men seek to impose their own definitions upon their woman partner and thereby neutralise or eradicate her experience of abuse and control the ways in which she interprets and responds to it. These findings strongly support Goffman's theoretical conception. In addition, they highlight the need for further investigation of how men's and women's accounts, definitions and responses to violence are interactionally connected through men's attempts to define the violence in exculpatory and expiatory terms and in women's resistance to such definitions and their implications.

Early formulations of the social model of disability have been subject to critical amendment by disabled women. Disabled women activists have, however, been equally critical of the failure of mainstream feminism to recognise the disability perspective. This article continues the approach taken by the author in an earlier paper in which she proposed the development of a model which understands the concerns of disabled women as central to both feminism and disability politics. It explores some of the complexities of a feminist agenda for disabled women in the linked arenas of sexuality, reproduction and motherhood, considering the contribution of a disability rights perspective to these core areas of feminist debate. It moves on to examine the potential contribution of a feminist disability perspective to the reconceptualisation of informal caring, where the experience of disabled women might help to untangle some of the dilemmas experienced by both men and women in the critical issues of caring and dependence.

This paper argues for a structural definition of oppression as systematic mistreatment. Using the work of Connell and other theorists, I discuss the implications of the proposed definition for the oppression of women and suggest that men, too, are systematically mistreated and therefore oppressed in modern societies. This structural concept of men's oppression is compared with the idea developed in the men's movement of the 1970s that men are oppressed by sex roles, and with more recent discourses of masculinity. I argue that men may have conflicting interests in relation to the gender order. While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many senses benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed by and within it. Since in many ways men's human needs and capacities are not met within the gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent ‘emancipatory interest’ in their transformation.

Though increasingly a focus of both political concern and academic research, ‘sex tourism’ is a difficult term to define. This article presents both quantitative and qualitative data on the sexual behaviour and attitudes of single and/or unaccompanied heterosexual female tourists in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. In so doing it aims to contribute to the body of research evidence on the phenomenon, as well as to highlight some of the conceptual problems associated with existing analyses of both ‘sex tourism’ and ‘romance tourism’. It calls for the development of a theoretical model of sex tourism which can accommodate both the diversity of tourist-related sexual-economic exchanges which take place in economically underdeveloped countries and the complexity of the power relations that underpin them.

In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as ‘the private’. In this he seeks to use ‘the private’ for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead on recent writings by some prominent male sociological theorists. Most significantly, he subsumes family life within his category of intimacy, but this may obliterate some ideas about ‘families’. Furthermore, parent–child relationships are about a great deal more than intimacy, not least because there are real issues of power involved. Our own concerns with the concepts of public and private have been to illuminate different ways of being that are associated with different sorts of social spaces. We outline four main tensions that may become overlaid to create extensive differences in ways of being, including a tension around differing understandings of the individual. In particular, we point out the significance of childhood and children in these tensions around public and private social spaces, and their associated practices and orientations.

Colin Coulter, Contemporary Northern Irish Society: An Introduction, London: Pluto Press, 1999, £45.00 (£14.99 pbk), 286 pp. (ISBN 0-7453-1244-6)

Graham Ellison and Jim Smyth, The Crowned Harp: Policing Northern Ireland, London: Pluto Press, 2000, £45.00 (£14.99 pbk), xix+218 pp. (ISBN 0-7453-1393-0)

Eamonn Slater and Michel Peillon (eds.), Memories of the Present: A Sociological Chronicle of Ireland 1997-1998, Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2000, IR£19.00, 268 pp. (ISBN 1-9024-4829-4)

Two common-sense phrases, widely used in everyday language, sum up the sociological paradox of Northern Ireland – ‘unless you're from the place you can't begin to understand it’, and ‘anyone who isn't confused here doesn't know what's going on’. That is, Northern Ireland is believed to be both unique and unintelligible. This is paradoxical for two reasons. Sociologists have long sought to render Northern Ireland intelligible and to locate it in a comparative framework with similar societies elsewhere. They have done so to the point where, along with other social scientists, they have made it one of the world's most researched societies. In his book on contemporary Northern Irish society, Coulter describes it as proportionately the most studied place on the planet.