The impact of childhood disability on family life

This is the second report of a study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that explored the costs to parents of bringing up a child with a severe disability. The first report, Paying to Care(Dobson and Middleton, 1998), described a minimum budget standard, which is the minimum amount that parents believed to be necessary to bring up a child with severe disabilities. This report describes the actual spending patterns of parents on 182 children with severe disabilities, and presents a detailed examination of how much parents actually spend on bringing up a severely disabled child. Fieldwork was conducted during 1997–98 and so all figures presented have been up-rated to 2000 by the Retail Price Index

Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurants and the Changing Meanings of Meat in Urban China

This article charts the changing meanings of meat in contemporary urban China and explores the role played by Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in shaping these changes. In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating. While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations between meat-eating and social status

“At ‘Amen Meals’ It’s Me and God” Religion and Gender: A New Jewish Women’s Ritual

New ritual practices performed by Jewish women can serve as test cases for an examination of the phenomenon of the creation of religious rituals by women. These food-related rituals, which have been termed ‘‘amen meals’’ were developed in Israel beginning in the year 2000 and subsequently spread to Jewish women in Europe and the United States. This study employs a qualitative-ethnographic methodology grounded in participant-observation and in-depth interviews to describe these nonobligatory, extra-halakhic rituals. What makes these rituals stand out is the women’s sense that through these rituals they experience a direct con- nection to God and, thus, can change reality, i.e., bring about jobs, marriages, children, health, and salvation for friends and loved ones. The ‘‘amen’’ rituals also create an open, inclusive woman’s space imbued with strong spiritual–emotional energies that counter the women’s religious marginality. Finally, the purposes and functions of these rituals, including identity building and displays of cultural capital, are considered within a theoretical framework that views ‘‘doing gender’’ and ‘‘doing religion’’ as an integrated experience

Is Qualitative Research Becoming McDonaldized?

The contention put forward by Ritzer (1993) that the McDonald's restaurant has become the model for the extension of bureaucratic and Scientific Management principles to diverse areas of contemporary social life has seized both the popular and the sociological imagination. The term ‘McDonaldization’ has entered both academic and lay discourses, and its four component themes of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control are seen as embodying current manifestations of an inexorably self-extending process of standardization. Of course, Ritzer's thesis has not gone uncontested, and has been the object of a number of important critiques. One of the areas to which Ritzer and others have applied the concept of McDonaldization is higher education, but in doing so there has been a tendency to emphasize teaching rather than research. It is the primary purpose of this article to explore the utility of the concept of McDonaldization for the understanding of certain aspects of qualitative research in sociology. As such a sociological concept is being turned back onto the academic community to explore whether it can illuminate an aspect of the research process

Crime and the processes of public knowledge

In a large scale, complex social system, many features of the system will be, by their very nature, quite beyond the scope of individual personal experience; these are the ‘macro-social’ parameters of the society in question; the rates, proportions, tendencies and trends whose dynamics, development and manifestations inevitably must be extremely difficult for the individual to grasp and comprehend, purely in terms of the direct experience available to him. Thus, we might assume, certain agencies may be seen as intervening between the individual and the large scale complex social reality that contains him, agencies offering the kinds of information and the kinds of perspective that might allow him to conceptualize many of these macro aspects of social reality, and to formulate attitudes, opinions, and orientations in relation to them. Looming large among such agencies are the so-called ‘mass-media’, and the interest of this study will be focused largely upon the way in which the media of mass communication provide information about a particular large-scale feature of contemporary society (namely the crime rate, and the nature of crime and the criminal), as well as, explicitly and implicitly, offering a conceptual and normative framework within which the material they provide may be organised