Current Sociology

This article examines the recent market repositioning of fur from a commodity chain perspective. It explores the transformation of the commodity chains of fur - from hunting to farming, as well as changes from a luxury industry characterized by the distant origins of the material and the expert craftsmanship that went into making the commodity to a designer industry in which exclusivity comes from the creative vision of a talented individual, but where production processes are based on industrial conditions. In addition, the article criticizes Gereffi’s simplistic distinction between producer-driven and buyer-driven commodity chains, and argues that alliances between producer organizations and fashion designers are characteristic of contemporary fashion. This alliance is examined in relation to the marketing organization for the Danish fur auctions, Saga of Scandinavia, which for the past 15 years has adopted the strategy of ‘pushing fur into the trend’.

Napping at work was typically a fugitive behaviour, a small act of resistance against the goals of management and the workplace clock. Increasingly, however, employers are encouraging employees to sleep at the worksite. Indeed, some actively encourage this once deviant behaviour, promoting its restorative features and its relationship to increased productivity. This article examines the emergence of the management organized workplace nap in the US. Attention is paid to how the cultural meaning of sleeping at work is changing to normalize a soporific state that was, at one time, grounds for dismissal. Colonizing the nap at work is part of a larger trend that is reconfiguring the once bounded relationships between home and work and public and private space and time. Importantly, normalizing the workplace nap is not uniform. We identify at least two variants: breaktime napping and worktime napping. Each variant represents a different degree of management oversight and reflects the varying autonomy of the employee. In a final discussion, this initiative to create a more flexible work environment by inviting once private and fugitive acts into the open spaces of the worksite is contrasted with the marked decline of the siesta in China and Spain.

The UK, the US and Australia today embody a type of governmentality which includes a strong element of anti-welfare rhetoric. However, these rationalities have retained - though modified - many elements of a welfare state. What purpose is served by this apparent paradox? It is possible to argue that the welfare state is a necessary precondition for the continued health of the globalized capitalist economies in these nations. This article explores these connections on a general level and makes some tentative suggestions on the functional significance of the current arrangements. In particular it is argued that in Australia the dual labour market is upheld by income support payments. The discourse of anti-welfarism legitimizes an increased level of control over income support recipients’ lives while simultaneously ensuring that expectations regarding citizen entitlements will be dampened - in short, this configuration of discourse and practices facilitates the process of constructing ‘docile bodies’.

Although the former Soviet totalitarian structures are being dismantled, new forms of political, economic and social organizations are not yet in place. In Communist Russia, the family as an ideological institution shaped official family policy. The contemporary transformation of Russian society has inevitably touched family life and women’s roles within it. This article presents an analysis of domestic violence in Russia, and makes recommendations for social action, legislation, social condemnation and the women’s movement.

Most studies of globalization emphasize the economic, political, social or cultural aspects; this article seeks to examine the moral aspect. It attempts to do this by examining the relationship of the global and the local. The thesis advanced is that decisions made on a more global level are likely to be more ‘moral’ than those made on a local level. This generalization is tested in terms of the US and national decisions, such as those concerning slavery and later civil rights. Extrapolation is then made to global decisions. The role of cosmopolitanism is explored. At the end, noting that the global and the local are always entwined, the question is tackled as to the circumstances under which the local or the global is to be most valued.

Transnationalism was originally connected to recent immigrant cohorts, but the concept has been expanded to include other groups of people, as well as a whole array of activities across borders. Cosmopolitanism is invoked both as a moral and ethical ideal, as well as a lived experience, thereby facilitating confusion between a theorist’s prescriptive and descriptive statements. In contemporary scholarship, the presence of transnationalism is often used as an indication of cosmopolitanism, and a linear positive correlation between the two is often implied. To rectify this confusion, it is more salient to conceive of transnational social spaces, social fields and communities as the end result of internal globalization (or glocalization). Glocalization allows for a twofold conception of cosmopolitanism: first, as situational ‘openness’ within local contexts and, second, as detachment from local ties. The essay explores these two conceptualizations and argues in favour of the second interpretation. Accordingly, cosmopolitans and locals form a continuum where individuals’ attitudes might range in strength depending upon specific dimensions. The essay develops an operationalization of the cosmopolitan-local continuum and discusses the specific dimensions where it is expected that each group’s attitudes would diverge.