Japanese Sociological Review

In the 1970's, the sudden rise of Scottish Nationalism had considerable impact on Britain, which had gained the reputation as the most integrated nation. In the same period, ethnic consciousness awakened elsewhere in Western Europe and has attracted attention from social scientists since then. This paper examines the social background of the rise of minority nationalism in Western Europe, mainly focusing on the Scottish case. It is found that although certain historical conditions helped ethnies to develop national consciousness, it was social changes experienced by Western European society after World War II that brought the ethnic resurgence there in the 1970's. These rises of minority nationalism in advanced industrial society pose challenging questions to Sociology : The persistence and function of ethnicity in modern society.

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Mead's standpoint of “behaviorism” is not one in which he made his social psychological research method clear, but one by which he marked his own philosophical mode of thinking with Bergson and Dewey against any form of epistemological “bifurcation of nature” and for his philosophy of the act. This standpoint “in-terms-of-the-act” is linked with his notions on temporality asserted against the teleological conceptions on history and Spencerian social evolutionism. The present is the locus of reality, because present possible act would make a new relatedness with a past event so that a new order or consentient set of events in Whitehead's term would emerge ; that it is not knowledge about the past but an act that makes the past a different past, the accident a necessary. This objectifiability of the past is the ground for the genesis of the reflective, social self. In order to have some meaning and to be a past, it is necessary for a passed event to be put into some ordering or line of acts, to be refered reflectively or backward from the standpoint of the present act. There functions a rhetoric or the “logic of a game”, made possible with the present act, to provide the way of reference and to thread acts into a line, which is of a sociological interest.

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In this study we analyze videotaped data of wheelchair-users' shopping situations from the point of view of ethnomethodological conversational analysis.
First, we pay attention to certain kinds of conversations and interactions which were observed in these data. Next, we present how membership categories like 'handicapped-persons' or 'attendants' are usable to not only participants but also observers in these socially organized situations. Furthermore, we present a possible solution of the problem how descriptions like 'handicapped-persons' or 'attendant' are related to these socially organized situations.

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