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Four conferences, held in Britain in 1991/2, on particular specialisms in Sociology considered their place within the curriculum and how distinctions can be drawn between what is essential to a first degree in Sociology and what are optional elements. The research aim was to develop a qualitative understanding of the way particular specialisms within Sociology are constituted through teaching and fined into the overall curriculum. The conferences were of practical benefit to the participants in clarifying assumptions embedded in alternative course designs, facilitating the flow of good ideas about teaching methods and learning materials and establishing personal contacts with teachers from other institutions in the same field of study. The topics of the four conferences were Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Work and Employment, Methods of Social Research and Sociological Theory.

Approaches to the sociology of culture have largely been constituted around the long tradition of functionalism in sociology. This has hampered the field greatly. Among other shortcomings, this intellectual foundation has led to a limited understanding of ideology and civil society, a conservative political orientation and an overdeterministic view of social action and the actor. In this paper, I explore and then apply a new approach to the sociology of culture, one that attempts to conceptualize more robustly the dynamics of ideology, ideological conflict and civil society. As part of this project, I endeavor to map out a critical cultural perspective that establishes a multidimensional understanding of the contingency of social action.

During the 1995 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, I presided over a panel discussion on new perspectives in the sociology of culture. Most of the papers are being published in this volume. The contributions by Annie Ruth Leslie and myself are additional papers.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight both the contribution and the present need to reconfigure the literature on “queue culture” as a precursor of the sociology of waiting.

The study employs a legal-structural lens in comparing the initial conceptual treatment of the archetypal “waiting line” with the “line” modifying sociology of waiting that results in waiting rooms, number and telephone queues and in the experience of online waiting.

The initial conception of the culture of the queue understates the importance of three factors: first, the role of third parties in the design, management and inculcation of rules binding those experiencing thick time; second the degree to which communication technology and its attachment to the “mobilities” paradigm has thinned the experience of thick time and lastly the degree to which the increasing commodification of the wait has resulted in the creation of waiting time as a form of pay as you go flexitime.

The social construction of waiting and the experience of thick time are shown to be increasingly part of the privatized market experience where queue management innovations not only are commercialized but have strong implications for the egalitarian social assumptions imbedded in the initial queue culture based sociology of waiting. Policy implications support the present pay for use philosophy increasingly applied in the transition from public to private management of space.

The self-policing “fairness” of the waiting line is now open to scrutiny given the proliferation of the newly shaped distributional logics imbedded in the management, design and use of waiting spaces.

Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber.

Draws on interviews with 76 English professors in 4 US universities to document emerging definitions of multiculturalism and connect them to organizational conditions in each department. Suggests that findings showed that the professors assigned meaning to the ambiguous and contested word, multiculturalism, according to the principles of organizational convenience rather than poligical conviction. Emphasizes the power of institutional routines for withstanding ideological challenges and illuminates the mechanisms through which resistance operates.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

This article questions whether a core objective of HRM – to manage organisational culture – is feasible, other than at a most superficial level. On the basis of an in‐depth case study analysis the authors argue that the dominant values of society at large are implicated in what appears to be the spontaneous formation and character of occupational cultures. The article raises the question of whether spontaneously occurring “cultures of excellence” are gratuitously hijacked by self‐serving managerial groups, happy to co‐opt the sub‐culture of work groups when it works to their advantage.

While sociology has usually aimed at producing general accounts of the postmodern social condition, it has not been influenced by the postmodern epistemological challenge but kept its accounts within the modern episteme. Suggests that autopoietic systems theory (AST) can supply a theoretical framework in which this can be done. Based on the concept of communication, this approach can sustain a theory of postmodernity that does not require ontological foundations and in which the fundamental self‐referentiality of scientific truths is affirmed rather than hidden. As such it is able to accommodate the postmodern epistemological challenge. Based on the concept of structural coupling, such a theory would be able to retain the fundamental connection between changes between structure and “culture”, while leaving the specifics of this connection open to empirical analysis.

To comment on Brewer and Venaik's review of the misapplication of the national culture dimensions of Hofstede and GLOBE at the individual and other sub‐national levels. This paper supports and extends their critique.

The implausibility of deterministic claims about the multi‐level power of national culture is described and discussed by drawing on a wide range of disciplines (including anthropology, geography, sociology, and historiography).

Descriptions of the characteristics and origins of sub‐national level behaviour based on a priori depictions of national culture values are invalid and misleading.

There are important implications for practitioners. The paper highlights the unsoundness of descriptions of the sub‐national (individuals, consumer segments, organizations, and so forth) which are derived from national‐level depictions of culture and the dangers of ignoring the independent causal influence of non‐national culture and non‐cultural factors.

The ecological fallacy in the national culture literature is located within a wider and long‐standing critique of that fallacy. The paper is the first to show that the fallacy in the national culture literature is often an extreme causal version. It not merely supposes cross‐level equivalence, as in the standard version, but more aggressively, it attributes deterministic power to national culture thus excluding other independent influences and agency.