Journal of Sociology articles from December 2003

Journal of Sociology archives from December 2003

Labour of Love: An Archaeology of Affect as Power in E-Commerce
December 1, 2003... Within the discursive environment of electronic commerce, particularly Web-based commerce, there are many claims of the empowered nature of the consumer. Some of this empowerment is alleged to lie in the social relations built in commercial...

Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue: 'Commercializing Emotions'
December 1, 2003... The articles in this special edition on 'Commercializing Emotions' represent a series of studies that apply and develop current approaches to consumption, with a focus on the content and emotional bases of its cultural meaning. In different...

Sign Consumption in the 19th-Century Department Store: An Examination of Visual Merchandising in the Grand Emporiums (1846-1900)
December 1, 2003... The activity of window-shopping appears to be one of the most popular pastimes of contemporary consumer culture. With seemingly endless repetition, consumers converge on city centres or giant suburban shopping malls to enjoy the visual delights...

Romantic Love and 'Getting Married': Narratives of the Wedding in and out of Cinema Texts
December 1, 2003... ********** Weddings provided the central theme of many cinematic box office hits in Australia and around the world during the 1990s. An assumption of this article is that the popularity, of such films as Father of the Bride and Muriel's...

Divergent Narratives in the Imagining of the Home Amongst Middle-Class Consumers: Aesthetics, Comfort and the Symbolic Boundaries of Self and Home
December 1, 2003... ********** What matters in the consumption act has largely been conceived by sociologists as relating to domains that are external to the consumer. Consumption, which incorporates the acts of anticipation, purchase and use of goods or...

Love Yourself: The Relationship of the Self with Itself in Popular Self-Help Texts
December 1, 2003... ********** Our age is often characterized as being preoccupied with self-referential systems (Giddens, 1992; Weeks, 1995) and in particular with the examination and reformation of the self which may take the form of a reflexive project of...

A History and Theory of the Social Sciences.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Peter Wagner London: Sage, 2001, viii + 200 pp., $39.95 (paperback) This book is a useful contribution to an ongoing debate of central concern to sociology and the social sciences more generally. It has significant strengths, arising from...

The Ends and Means of Welfare: Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Peter Saunders Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002, ix + 300 pp., $39.95 (paperback). There is a multitude of books available which examine the welfare system, so it is hard to become immediately excited by the prospect of...

Towards a Politics of the Rainbow: Self-Organization in the Trade Union Movement.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Jill C. Humphrey Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002, xii + 302 pp., 45 [pounds sterling] (hardback) This book goes beyond the limits of its subtitle. It addresses the issues, dilemmas, possibilities and perils of coalition politics at...

Nationalism and Social Theory.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Gerard Delanty and Patrick O'Mahony London: Sage, 2002, 207 pp. In what ways can we describe the contemporary global war on terror and its relationship to nation and identity? What do the Australian national strategies of managing asylum...

Cultural Theory: an Introduction.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Philip Smith Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001, ix + 268 pp., $47.95 (paperback). Smith aims to provide an overview of as many approaches to culture as he considers important to sociologists. And that's a lot: classical social theory;...

Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... B.S. Turner and C. Rojek London: Sage, 2001, xv + 249 pp. Turner and Rojek set out in this book, so their Preface suggests, to 'rebuild contemporary sociology around the classical theme of social action... to rejuvenate the sociological...