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Purpose – This concluding essay suggests how contemporary developments in cultural sociology can enrich and extend the American sociology of work. While recent studies in the sociology of work consider more fully the role of sense making and representations in workers’ lives, we propose additional possibilities for conceptual and theoretical cross-pollination. We propose questions that a cultural sociologist might ask about European workers in the age of neo-liberalism.

Methodology/approach – We examine how authors in this volume and its companion (Brady, 2011), and other students of workers approach culture-related phenomena. In particular we focus on how they use culture as explanans and explananda. Borrowing from Lamont and Small (2008) and Small, Harding, and Lamont (2010), we present a set of analytical tools that cultural sociologists use widely. We then draw from culturally focused studies of workers to illustrate how researchers have used these concepts.

Findings – Research on European workers documents important political and economic trends that affect this group, but it examines less frequently how individuals understand, experience, and respond to these changes. With tools from cultural sociology, we can explore these understudied aspects of the conditions and lives of European workers.

Originality/value of paper – To our knowledge, this is the first systematic discussion of how concepts from contemporary cultural sociology can enrich research on European workers.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the status of Emile Durkheim's work in the United States, and on the prospects of its rehabilitation in light of the crisis of theory engendered by the critique of the theory of the sign and the paradox presented by the application of terms that invoke an inertial view of culture to everyday discourse.

Design/methodology/approach – How is it possible to reconcile the most general aspect of the internal life of the sociality that Durkheim places under the name of “solidarity,” with the theoretically expansive idea of social movements and with an idea of a generative culture radically different from the inertial institutional concept attributed to Durkheim? Our argument depends on conceiving of society as a course of activity, therefore, according to internal relations among subjectivities and objectivities. The main ontological assumptions of the human sciences are that humans and human affairs are essentially social and that sociality is irreducible and irrepressible. That difference lies at the heart of every attempt to identify something as unitary, complete, and stable.

Findings – Culture is tied to social movements, where the latter are thought of as expressions of the “becoming” of society. An understanding of the dynamics of culture requires revisiting dialectics and “internal relations.” The challenge to the idea of meaning based on the exchange of signs requires a reformulation of basic categories of human science. When the social is thought of as historical, it is necessary to think of history as immanent rather than as a condition or temporal course. Therefore, one is driven back to Marx by way of Hegel, where “history” refers to the contradictory character of whatever can be said about the social. It follows that every instance of unity is merely ostensible and cannot be relied on as a primary referent of a social science.

Research limitations/implications – “Culture” can no longer stand for something inert; rather, it appears as radically generative and reflexive. Further, it is not independent of economic reality, though it has the sort of weight that makes economism impossible.

Originality value – This chapter will stimulate more insightful appreciations of the work of Emile Durkheim, relative to his typical reception in U.S. social science. For instance, to reappropriate Durkheim for theoretical purposes, it is necessary to work through the problems raised by poststructuralism and the literature of ethnomethodology and its adjacent areas of research, with attention to the ontological presuppositions of theories of human affairs and the epistemological requirement of all the human sciences, that theory find itself in its object and its object in itself.

The aim of this chapter is to examine and problematize the taken-for-granted conceptual understanding of risk practices in sport cultures. By inspecting the mainstay, and one might argue relatively stagnant, constructions of risk in the sociological study of sport, a case for attending to a wider range of risk-based ideologies and cultural practices is presented. The chapter ventures away from viewing risk as predominantly physical in sport settings and constructing athletes as oppressed agents who naively acquiesce to practices of self-injury and self-alienation in sport cultures. Emphasis is given to a broad spectrum of risks undertaken in the practice of sport, and the reflexive, personal nature by which risk may be understood by sports and physical culture participants.

In the first part of the chapter, the relatively simplistic or unidimensional construction of risk in sociological research in sport is reviewed. In the second part, the complexity of the concept of risk is then discussed alongside case examples that push the analytical boundaries of how risk is a multidimensional construct of athletes’ minds, bodies, selves, beliefs, values, and identities in a host of relational contexts.

Risk is best understood as a set of practices and belief that exists on a continuum in sport and physical cultures. Risk-taking in sport, however, can be personally injurious and detrimental along a number of lines but is also often calculated, personally/group satisfying and existentially rewarding at times. If the concept of risk is to be applied and interrogated in sport and physical cultures, it should be done so, therefore, in radically contextual manners.

This chapter illustrates the need for new and exploratory theoretical understandings of what risk means to athletes and other participants in sport and physical culture. New substantive topics are proposed, as are methodological suggestions for representations of the unfolding risk in the process of “doing” sport.

This text is the result of an extensive bibliographical research on the development of Childhood Studies in various regions of Brazil based on the understanding that childhood is a social discursive construction, as well as human rights, and both concepts are interlinked when the subject in focus is the children’s rights. According to research data while advances in the concept of childhood have supported specific child protection policies, the issue of marginalization and inequalities affecting children is some of the central matters developed within childhood studies in Brazil. In this article, we map the advances of childhood studies in Brazil and its relation to children’s rights. However, we may state that neither childhood nor children’s rights are still a reality for all Brazilian children, especially when considering other markers that have challenged the rights of our children, such as race, ethnicity, social class, and gender.

Compared with the history of many other countries, sport has had an exceptional role in the Finnish transformation from a young to a mature nation. Finland has a relatively long tradition in the sociology of sport. The interest has been focused on a wide range of physical activities. At the same time, the parent discipline of sociology has been a “mother” science in the field; as such the more representative term in Finland for this area is the “social science of sport and physical activity.” Finnish sociology of sport is strongly concentrated in Jyväskylä and most of the scholars in the field have been educated at the University of Jyväskylä. Recently the research in the field has spread to other universities and new perspectives have enriched the research. The critical mass of Finnish sociology of sport is not very big. Approximately 400 students have graduated in the field during its history and approximately 60 have worked in the field as professional researchers. Most of the publications in the field are for a domestic audience. The group of internationally active scholars is relative small. The variety of research themes is nevertheless wide. However, interest has continued in a few of them, and has focused on several researchers. In this respect, the most central themes have included changes in sports culture, socialization into sport and physical activities, gender and physical activities, the social significance of sport and physical activity, and organized sport movements.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the development of Czech sociology of sport with respect to socio-political changes over the last 50 years. A comparative sociological approach was used to analyze books, articles, and other types of research productivity. The analysis shows that Czech sociology of sport has developed in three different periods: first, linked to the development of mainstream sociology; second, as a body of socially oriented sport research; and third, as an educational sub-discipline increasingly located in university sport faculties. However, the interest of the State in sociology has significantly decreased since 1990, which has created its own Czech-specific issues. The chapter is based on the method of literature review and, because of the author’s professional activities in sport organizations as well university research, also on a type of “auto-ethnography.”