Life-story interviews carried out in the Czech Republic confirm that the new business elite is dominated by men who had already achieved high managerial positions in the Communist era. More surprisingly, however, they also reveal a marked overrepresentation within this group of descendants of the national bourgeoisie that was expropriated when the Communists came to power in 1948. These ‘buoyant class’ life stories show some of the ways in which children of bourgeois lineage were able to negotiate their way around the Communist regime's ‘class politics’. They also show how bourgeois family lineage can now be used as a resource for averting the potential moral stigma of a Communist-era senior executive career. The ‘buoyant class’ appears to be a self-confident and significant component of the new Czech business elite.

One of the most characteristic features of contemporary debates in the social sciences is the growth of interest in non-class forms of social division and identity, accompanied by an increasing focus on ethnic and gender inequalities. This paper attempts to provide a frame for incorporating such divisions into stratification theory by placing the notion of ‘social division’ at centre stage and redrawing its boundaries. The paper pays particular attention to ethnicity and class for the purposes of the argument. It is argued that a theorisation of social divisions can show how non-class forms of division and identity constitute central elements of the stratification system of modern societies. Such an approach also marries better with the wealth of evidence that scholars of ethnicity and ‘race’ have been collecting on the importance of race/ethnicity as structuring social location and differential and unequal social outcomes.

This paper draws on data from an on-going ESRC project on choice of higher education. It focuses primarily on the experiences of non-traditional applicants to higher education. Although these students are not typical of the entire university entry cohort, their narratives raise important issues in relation to race, class and higher education choice processes. These ‘success stories’ reveal important causes for concern as well as reasons for celebration. In particular, their experiences of the choice process are qualitatively different from those of their more privileged middle-class counterparts, highlighting key class and racial differences and inequalities.

This paper uses data gathered from an ESRC funded research project on social networks, social capital and lifestyle to provide an account of contemporary class identities derived from 178 in-depth interviews carried out in the Manchester area between 1997 and 1999. We use this data to unpack the ambivalent nature of contemporary class identities. We argue that despite the diversity of the sample, a number of common elements characterize people's attitudes to class. People are more hesitant in placing themselves in classes than they are about talking class as a social and political issue. Most people wish to see themselves as ‘outside’ classes. Even so, class is a marker by which people relate their life histories, and most people are aware of class terminology. The major division in our sample is between those with the cultural capital to play reflexively with ideas of class, and those who lack these resources and feel threatened by the implications of relating class to their own personal identities. This latter group are mainly concerned to establish their own ‘ordinariness’, which we read as a defensive device to avoid the politics of being labelled in class terms. Both middle-class and working-class identities can be used to establish ordinariness. We argue that sociologists should not assume that there is any necessary significance in how respondents define their class identity in surveys. We use these findings to take forward debates deriving from Bourdieu regarding class identity.

According to Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction, children from middle-class families are advantaged in gaining educational credentials due to their possession of cultural capital. In order to assess this theory, I have developed a broad operationalisation of the concept of cultural capital, and have surveyed pupils on both their own and their parents' cultural capital. I will conclude that cultural capital is transmitted within the home and does have a significant effect on performance in the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations. However, a large, direct effect of social class on attainment remains when cultural capital has been controlled for. Therefore, ‘cultural reproduction’ can provide only a partial explanation of social class differences in educational attainment.

This article is based on research among beauty therapists in two cities. Therapists saw their work less in terms of what it does to make women look better, more in terms of what it does to make women feel better. They described the treatment as offering stress relief and greater self-confidence, but also described the work they do to manage their own emotions in the salon. Beauty therapy could, therefore, be seen as a form of what Hochschild has called ‘emotional labour’. The authors argue that this claim can be understood ‘as an instance of occupational rhetoric’; the interviewees stressed the emotional work they performed as an argument for a better and more professional perception of beauty therapy than it actually enjoys. But it can also be read as a description of aspects of the labour process in which they are engaged. Like much emotional labour this expenditure of effort on the part of the beauty therapists is not reflected in pay and conditions, being to a large extent socially ‘invisible’ in a highly gendered (but not sexualised) occupation. Therefore the claim to perform emotional labour may be a somewhat risky strategy in terms of developing a ‘professional project’ for beauty therapy.

This paper draws upon empirical research into the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. This industry is becoming increasingly important as a provider of knowledge and expertise to employers and individuals. We suggest that the literature on new forms of service employment (emotional labour and hybrid forms of work) has neglected to explore well-paid professional employees. We argue that this group is equally implicated in societal pressures to conform to conventional heterosexual images of femininity and masculinity. Pressures to conform do not have to come from management, but from professional bodies, the media and clients. Image consultancy provides one way of encouraging employees to alter their image as the advice can be packaged as independent of the employer and professional. We conclude that the new profession of image consultancy is more about gender than image. Consultants are selling codified knowledge for the construction of particularly socially accepted or preferred forms of bodily identity.

In a recent article in this journal, Andrew Sayer has argued that much feminist research on the gendered nature of organisations, such as bureaucracy and the market, confuses a contingent association of gender and organisational forms with a stronger claim that they are intrinsically gendered. Sayer accepts that this research has shown that the empirically found, concrete forms of organisations are gendered. However, deeper theoretical reflection, he suggests, reveals that, when considered as ‘abstract realist models’, bureaucracy and the market are, in fact, identity-blind. He makes two claims, one concerned with explanation, the other concerned with the political consequences of social inquiry. The first is that the construction of abstract models, rather than the ‘associational’ thinking concerned with the delineation of empirical regularities, is necessary to the proper understanding of the operation of causal mechanisms and their mode of determination in social life. The second is that this will enable a more progressive and positive politics beyond a fatalism which he attributes to associational thinking. This paper takes issue with both claims arguing that the abstract theory he defends has no positive role in social inquiry and that his political critique is misplaced.

My article was a critique of what I termed associational thinking, illustrated by reference to examples concerning markets, bureaucracy and gender. I counterposed associational thinking, with its suspicion of abstraction, to counterfactual thinking, which is concerned not with what things happen to be associated together but with which social objects necessarily depend on one another and which do not. While it is clearly vitally important to know how social objects are associated with one another, and what consequences flow from this, it is also important – for practical and political, as well as academic, reasons – to know whether they have to be associated thus, or whether things could be otherwise. Thus, in response to phenomena which are widely found in association, such as capitalism and various forms of gender order, the counterfactual questions would be: is each a necessary condition of the existence of the other, or could one exist without the other? As a second theme of the paper, I argued that a modified version of the distinction between system and lifeworld was useful in understanding the particular associations under discussion.

Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, £14.99 paperback, vii+379 pp. (ISBN 0-333-60081-8)

Stephen May (ed.), Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. London: Falmer Press, 1999, £16.99 paperback, vii+296 pp. (ISBN 0-7507-0767-4)

Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (eds.), Multicultural Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, iv+267 pp. (ISBN 0-19-829610-X)

Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London: Zed Press, 2000, £15.95 paperback, x+262 pp. (ISBN 1-95649-559-4)

Long recognized as a signifier of difficult matters of policy and schooling, multiculturalism as an idea did not really take hold, in Britain at least, until the 1990s. The ‘cultural turn’ in social theory has helped underscore the second half of the multicultural label, whilst the overwhelmingly pluralist cast of contemporary thought has affirmed the ‘multi’ part. Accordingly, multiculturalism has resisted subsumption under apparently more singular and materialist projects such as anti-racism, political economy and radical postcoloniality. Yet until recently there have been few systematic attempts to articulate and defend the idea of multiculturalism, or to work out its full consequences for concrete understanding. The books under review are important contributions to the development of multiculturalist theory and research, sharpening our sense of multiculturalism's analytical and political reach - its ‘problematic’. Above all, and in strikingly different ways, these volumes wrestle with the taxing overarching issue of whether ‘multiculturalism’ can stand not only as an appropriate descriptive encapsulation of contemporary social diversity, but also as a fully-fledged theoretical and evaluative perspective.