Consumption caught in the cash nexus.

During the last thirty years, ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation

Harmonisation of demographic and socio-economic variables in cross-national survey research

The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how demographic and socio-economic variables in cross-national comparative survey research can be harmonized. After a short introduction discussing the difference between translation and harmonization, the path from a national concept and structure to an internationally-applicable measurement instrument is traced using the education variable as an example. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document. (author's abstract

New Labour and the theory of globalization

This article argues that the theoretical basis of the New Labour project was sociological in its framing, drawing in particular on the ideas of Anthony Giddens. The theory of globalization, individualization and risk advanced by him and others became the rationale for New Labour’s rejection of ‘traditional’ socialist and welfare ideologies, holding the collectivist, materialist and class-based politics that these had upheld to be now obsolete. However, it is argued that Marxist analytic perspectives retain their relevance in understanding the dynamics of what is more clearly understood as global capitalism than in the more diffuse language of globalization. The concept of systemic contradiction developed by sociologists such as David Lockwood in the 1980s retains its relevance as an analytical resource in contemporary capitalist society

Using Quasi-variance to Communicate Sociological Results from Statistical Models

The online version of this article can be found at