Tranquillisers as social control?*

In this paper we use findings from an empirical study of the meaning of tranquilliser prescribing and use to examine the contention that these drugs are a means of social control, and to assess the explanatory value of the concept of social control when applied to the doctor-patient relationship. We first outline the historical application of the concept to the health field, specify the cultural mechanisms by which social control is said to be achieved and look at the ways in which the mechanisms are thought to operate through the prescribing of the most widely used kind of tranquilliser/hypnotic-benzodiazepines (e.g. Valium, Mogadon). We then draw on our data to see how far they substantiate the arguments which have been developed. In the final section of the paper we suggest some alternative explanations regarding the nature of doctors' power and of patient dependence. We also discuss problems involved in conceptualizing gender and class ideologies, note an inherent tendency towards an over-socialized view of the person and assess the usefulness of functionalist explanations stemming from the application of the social control concept to the doctor-patient relationship.     

Why the Sociology of Morality Needs Bourdieu's Habitus*

Though Pierre Bourdieu has been criticized for ignoring the moral dimensions of social judgments, I suggest that his habitus concept can provide a useful theoretical foundation for a sociological analysis of morality. If the habitus is revised in a way that recognizes the embodied nature of cognition, it can be treated as a foundation for moral judgments of the self and of others. A revised habitus concept can account for two processes by which moral judgments are shaped by social settings: (1) cultural influences on feelings and expressions of emotion; and (2) the ways moral metaphors are structured by embodied cognitive schemas. In both processes, universal bodily operations are employed in different configurations across cultural settings. I argue that a modified habitus concept that can account for these phenomena has significant implications for the sociological analysis of lay morality.     

Theoretical Foundations for Digital Text Analysis

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine‐assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical foundations suitable for machine‐assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder‐Vass (2012), Kaidesoja (2013) and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be (and in practice implicitly are) based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non‐discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman (2006) and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software.     

‘Race’-education policy as social control?

This paper focuses on the instrumentalist Marxist model which has been used to explain the policies of the British state in the field of ‘race’-education. After discussing the model's core assumptions and its application in this field the paper explores the model's explanatory adequacy through a case study of the role of the quasi-state agencies of the ‘race’-relations industry in developing ‘race’-education policy in initial teacher education. It ends by considering whether a new conceptual framework is needed to understand ‘race’-education policy.