Brine (1999) offers an analysis of what she defines as the ‘“class ceiling” [these are] the structures and processes that prevent working-class women from getting out of the cellar’ (ibid.: 2). In this her analysis focuses on European education and training policy. This is because education and training appear to offer a way out of […]

There is a strange paradox about the current practice of social science. On the one hand, statistical evidence. . . shows that inequalities between social groups have been increasing… At the same time interest in material inequalities as a topic for social scientific analysis has been steadily diminishing, especially those forms of inequality. . . […]

The historical antecedents of the standard sex equality argument can be found in the work of seventeenth — and eighteenth-century political and philosophical liberal theory. This is a period commonly termed the Enlightenment, marked as it is by a European philosophical movement whose basic belief was the superiority of reason as a guide to knowledge […]

• Women and men have equal natures Axiom • So if women are given equal treatment with men Programme • The outcome will be equal performance Goal (Thornton, 1986: 78) Feminist history tells us of the significant campaigns that have been undertaken to enable women to vote, to give them access to higher education and […]

An understanding of male and female as distinctly different and complementary to an understanding of male and female as equal was a radical shift in gender ideology. (Munro, 1998: 52) E vans (1994) suggests that there are three issues that are central to contemporary feminist conceptualizations of equality. The first is that the most common […]

I have been concerned in this chapter to indicate something of multiple meaning and conceptual contestation. I have used the question ‘What is “woman”?’ at various points for exemplification. Sylvester (1999) is simi­larly concerned with the meanings and representations of ‘woman’ and her research explores this through the further problematic concept of progress. Specifically, Sylvester […]

A common strategy in the management of concepts in social research is to take a technical approach. This requires the operationalization of a concept into key indicators. A classic statement in this regard would be ‘Concepts are, by their nature, not directly observable. We cannot see social class, marital happiness, intelligence, etc. To use concepts […]

Building on the notion of differance, deconstruction sees social life as a series of texts that can be read in a variety of ways. Because of this multiplicity of readings there is, therefore, a range of meanings that can be invoked. Moreover, through each reading we are producing another text to the extent that we […]

A dualism is more than a relation of dichotomy, difference, or non­identity, and more than a simple hierarchical relationship. In dualistic construction, as in hierarchy, the qualities (actual or supposed), the culture, the values and the areas of life associated with the dualised other are systematically and pervasively constructed and depicted as inferior. Hierarchies, however, […]

The plurality of language and the impossibility of fixing meaning once and for all are basic principles of poststructuralism. (Weedon, 1997: 82) As a ‘post’-theorization, poststructuralism follows on from the work of structuralist theories of language. This is an important point because it draws attention to what is both common and distinctive to structuralism and […]