Sociological Review. August 2008, 56(3)

Dennis is anxious about 'virtual-vigilantism' - the dark side of growing decentralized surveillance (think cell-phone video). Combined with web2.0's ability to spread viral outrage, the danger of cruel and possibly dangerous web-lynchings is real. Possible solutions: get used to it... and stop being a jerk around cellphones.

Meah & Co. are chewing through the sex narratives of three generations of East Yorkshire families to examine transitions into adulthood and their connections to heterosexuality. Irreducible to the actual sex, heterosexual relations are presented as a broader family-monitored institution linked to adulthood.

Kaspersen & Gabriel take us through Elias's survival unit concept - an elementary social particle, lying at the end of a chain of dependencies, defined through the provision of safety, sustenance and the like. They're where the relational buck stops, so to speak, pointing us towards a consideration of conflict and war. Worth a read.

Backett-Milburn looks at Scottish women in low-paid food retailing, and their management of various obligations (domestic work, child and aged care etc.). Findings: jobs often needed to fit around caring duties, which were seen as primary. Where work grabs focus, home 'emergencies' will bring it back. Balancing moral identities (good mother, good daughter...) was a difficult and ongoing project. Finally the obligation mindset often also applies to work, provided the employer reciprocates.

Bourdieu's gender is très révolutionnaire. Yair links up his analyses to a preoccupation with 1789. The takeaway: without the ancien régime in mind you're missing a whole layer of Bourdieu.

Moor covers British brand consultancies (advertisers with a vaguer remit). Their attitude to research is ambivalent, there's a 'cult of creativity' (big egos), and their claims of being powerful cultural intermediaries might be a little overblown.

The Czech Republic's communist-party era educational inequalities and mobilities come into focus for Simonová. Increasing educational equality between men and women was the only obvious highlight. A brief increase in general mobility did occur, but it was a blip. The good bits probably had more to do with generally expanded education, and industrialization, than with any enlightened educational policy. Unlike trendy jeans and a decent selection of doughnut toppings, you'd think educational equality would be the sort of thing a state like that could have actually got right. Oh well...

Runciman is tired of Marx Weber and Durkheim: bring on Darwin. He points to an often automatic and ignorant dismissal of modern evolutionary thinking by sociologists (even if our models aren't quite as weak as the evolutionary types make out). There's a lot of value in the work of neo-Darwinian psychologists and philosophers, much of it directly applicable to sociological research. He cites a favorable example, where sociological work has evolutionary reasoning in play. The Viscount of Doxford has a point.

Journal of Management Studies. July 2008, 45(5)

Six & Sorge provide a mixed-method comparison of two Dutch consultancies ( engineering and HR) to isolate the effect of 'trust enhancement policies' (employed by the latter). There's plenty of data and charts to chew on, with trust enhancement policies the winner on the day ('InnovAction' anyone?). Relational Signalling Theory gets by, but misses ability as a building-block of trust.

Telemig's senior management wield corporate identity as a political resource in Rodrigues & Child. The means and successes of various identities are presented (nice table), and conflicts are outlined. A model is offered (average diagram). End result: there's political meat on those bland interpretative 'identity' bones. Well yeah.

Ringberg & Reinhlen take on knowledge transmission, bringing in the mind ('positivists' and 'constructionists' are in for a thrashing; both might be surprised to know how wedded they are to stable, history-free semantics). Mind and culture get the flow-chart treatment, giving us a spread of transfer types with a suggested management focus on the cognition of receivers, levels of collaboration and information 'types'. Knowledge theories often need 'more brain' but for others in the area this is sure to irk.

International entry-mode choice, real option theory and transaction cost economics (.pdf) are getting well off the sociological. And Brouthers, Brouthers & Werner are all about it. Another Dutch org under the microscope.

Lee & Park let things get pretty numerical pretty quick. International alliances are encouraged by 'international' senior management, especially when the choices get dicey.

Jansen & co. have a fine-tuner based on surveys from a financial services firm (Dutch again): organizational ambidexterity (new stuff in both old and new areas) thrives on vision. It is indifferent to integration, and team performance-pay helps.

Stoelhorst wraps up with 'Why is management not an evolutionary science?' - a six book review essay. This is the broader interest piece in the issue. Quick way there: good idea with a tricky history; offers good tools, but how 'evolutionary' are they? Read this one.