With a theoretical reconstruction of Tocqueville's sociological discourses on liberty, religion and moeurs (manners, customs), we discover the fundamental concept of “moral homogeneity” which constitutes, in itself, one basic condition of liberty. This idea will serve as a key concept for theorizing on the formation of a social network of trust in our future society.

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Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno give a radical account of the enlightenment which appears in Dialektik der Aufklirung. The aim of this paper is to consider the concept ‘Enlightenment’ by camparing it with the concept of ‘Rationality’ which is used in this paper as one of the main concepts in ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf. ’ We will find that ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Rationality’ have some connections. For example, these concepts have the same meaning in some ways. Further, Horkheimer was influenced by Max Weber. By comparing these concepts, this paper suggests one reading that ‘Enlightenment’ can be interpreted in terms of ‘Rationality. ’

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Time is one of the themes that sociology deals with as important. Current social theories are attempting to grasp time in various dimensions. G.H.Mead and A.Schutz, who investigated time in relation to act, took the lead in such attempts. This ‘time-in-act’, because of its unique structure that consists of the three phases of present-past-future, is quite different from the one-dimensional time as a measure which is used in most traditional sciences. This paper attempts to put these two thinkers' theories of time-in-act in order, and compare them to show both common and diversing characteristics in their treatment of time-in-act. It will serve time studies in social theory to give a detailed explanation of time in relation to act.

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In P. Bourdieu's theory of practice, habitus is a principal concept. Also, habitus importantly combines with other concepts of Bourdieu, for example, “field”, “capital”, etc.
I examine the function of habitus and the possibility of its transformation, through probing into case-studies of Bourdieu and a scholar of the Bourdieu-school (P. Champagne). By this examination, it becomes clear that the theory of practice can analyze historical social changes. Aditionally, I intend to show that habitus, which tends to reproduce objective structures of the social world, still provides for the possibility of the transformation.

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Some authors claim that the traditional study of interaction between nature and human society--from an anthropocentric perspective--ignores natural or ecological limits. Therefore, they assert that we must convert our perspective from anthropocentrism to anti-anthropocentrism. However, a historical-cultural perspective shows us that there is no objective nature such as the anti-anthropocentric perspective proposes to represent, which is primarily based on dualism. In this respect, we should understand that nature is a historical construction of a community for the very simple reason that to deny human acts or society means to deny and to exclude the human from nature. In this paper, I will discuss these two perspectives and reveal the utility of adopting an historical-cultural perspective.

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“Race” and “racism”, are often described as “biological categories”. And “nation” as “cultural category”. But this seemingly clear-cut dichotomy is misleading. In this paper, I focus on these categories -espacially “racism”-, examine the historical context and explore the methodological perspectives utilized in its prior examination. To do so, Foucault's argument about “bio-power” is helpful to us. According to him, “racism” can be considered with the notion of the power of “normalization”. Ann Stoler posed that Foucault's framework should be taken in a context which brings metropole and colony into a single analytical field, stressing the import of this combination for overcoming the previous theoretical limitations.

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Current standard policies of regional development have been grounded, from their inception, solely upon the wishes of manufacturing concerns. This paper deals with this policy with reference to industrialization theories. With the conviction of an inevitable and universal process of industrialization, those administering development policies have inherited an optimistic viewpoint about any gaps and limit of development. Also, after reviewing the actual policies implemented, social development theories have been altered by the influence of economic growth-oriented claims. Therefore, I suggest that it is necessary to retink the contents of development as well as critically review pro-industry standpoints in order to validate the critics of regional development policies.

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In the period of high economic growth in Japan, the word ‘seikstu life no shistu quality’ was accepted as associated with ‘seikastu-ken the right of (social) life, ’ which has been one of the keywords of many new social movements. In this paper, through specifying the usage of ‘quality of life’ in the govenment papers concerning welfare policies in the 1970s, I show that the keyword has lost its accent connoting the right (of life) and has been redifined in favour of the private sector. Then, I discuss that the very term ‘life’ itself has been contested between the neo-conservative side and the new social movements side because of its importance for constructing social identities.

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A conception of ‘technological order’ is proposed to understand the interactions between informational technology and ‘network’ like industrial organizations, which would lead to the accumulation of technology and capital in the ‘informational capitalism. ’ This new form of capitalism has been characterized by Manuel Castells as “the production of knowledge by knowledge. ” By means of the investigation of the recent literatures on the economics of innovation and industrial organization, in addition to empirical research concerning the technological development and socio-economic changes in biotechnology, it is postulated that ‘configurational’ ontogeny of the technology and the tight protection of intellectural property have played an important role in affording the inter-firm collaborations in R & D, hence creating a ‘technological order’ in which technical knowledge is exchanged, combined, and accumulated.

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It is often said that bureaucratic administraton is to be controlled by democratic processes. While attempting to adhere to these constraints, every administration has a section of public relations to reflect the needs and opinions of the public it is to serve. There are, however, ‘dilemmas of bureaucratic administration’ in that it is impossible to accept every opinion and satisfy every need, because of the very limits of bureaucratic functions. The purpose of this paper is to clarify such a dilemma as concrete affairs by interviews with staff members working in sections of bureaucratic offices. We will observe the logic of bureaucratic ‘conversations’ constructed continually in ordinary works.

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In sociology, many studies have pointed out that the combination of marriage with love had not been established until the modern era. The purpose of this paper focusing solely on Japan is to clarify the essence of the transformation of love that is conjectured from the fact that the Japanese word “ren-ai” means approximately the same thing as the English “love” or the French word amour. Furthermore, ren-ai has been prominent use in Japan since the Meiji period. Through an analysis of ‘love, ’ I want to provide and to show the grounds for an argument that understanding historical change in a specific mode of communication is one way to make clear endemic elements of “modernity. ”

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The aim of this paper is to elucidate a pragmatic use of imagination, focusing on that of the political police to detect latent complaint in wartime Japan. Public scribblings, collected and recorded by the police, provide a good instantiation. During the war (1931-45), they took care of them as anti-establishment political thought, and collected them in the Tokko Geppo, a monthly secret report about the social movements. At the same time, they treated them as the representation of latent complaint in the society, having nothing to do with the Left. Therefore, these documents had two aspects: 1) thought control and its crackdown, 2) research about the society the police were sworn to protect. To attain both goals, the police developed their imagination based on the memory of city riot in the Taisho era. From fragmentary graffiti, they imagined the disturbances which might grow up into riot behind the calm society under their powerful control. These compilations are the vestige of police's method to comprehend their contemporary society.

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Although senile dementia is medically defined as physical disorders of the brain, from the sociological perspective, senility is a conception that is socially constructed. I focus on how social members interpret and react when engaged in interaction with those who are putatively senile, and find that their embarrassment and some general epistemological characteristics of human beings are closely connected. This point of view is evident, not only for layman/senile person interactions, but also in caregiver's groups such as the ADRDA where caregiver/patient interactions are interpreted as epistemological balancing styles.

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This paper investigates how the arrangement of participants' bodies, talks and activities in particular time and space organize their interactions. The empirical research was done by using videotapes of dispatchers receiving emergency calls in a 119 dispatch center. While one dispatcher (call taker) replies to an emergency call, he and his colleague are able to silently interact with each other. This shows that their actions construct a type of back region and the call taker is embedded within two ‘participation frameworks’: one with the caller, and the other with his colleague.
This analysis shows that these concepts, “region” and “participation framework”, proposed by Erving Goffman, apply to actual settings and that they are organized by the arrangement of the participants' bodies, talks and activities.

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The purpose of this paper is to consider the possibility of a new sociological approach to explicating mass media reception. First, we outline Steven Clayman's discussion on displaying neutrality in television news interviews. Clayman elucidates how the interviewer's neutral stance is achieved in and through the social organization of television news interviews. Then, reconsidering Clayman's analysis, we explicate a social organization in the very process of watching television news interviews. This paper suggests a sociological approach to practices of receiving mass media.

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It seems that social scientists somehow understand their papers despite the fact that it is impossible to decide “clear” relation between them and what is called methodological criteria. Accordingly, in this paper, theory is addressed not as something to be improved, but as phenomena embedded in our work of writing and reading within those situations where they are done. Two features -‘sign reading practice’ and ‘impression of rationality’- are examined as ways to achieve making sense of [purported] SCIENCE. It is concluded that theorizing activities are never isolated from our everyday work.

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This paper is a critical examination of the ‘Social Constructionist’ social problem research methodology, which seeks to overcome the intrusion of subjectivity into social research and ensure research objectivity. The school's position-and that of many of its critics'-is focused on identification of, and the approach to be used in the study of, social problems as well as defining the research boundaries of a sociology of social problems. In critical response, this paper will argue from H. Sacks's insight of Membership Categorization Devices which convincingly demonstrates the essential quality of categories for members' sense making of the world-for good, for bad, or for indifferent. Based on this, we propose an alternative approach to the study of social problems.

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Since 1990, we have seen a new expression about women's bodies in magazines, especially those devoted to an audience of women. The term geki-yase (getting terribly-slim or often awful-slim) indicates several aspects of the ‘slimmed body. ’ It refers to dramatic effects of commodities for slimming, a successful slimming diet of an actress (and her method), or too haggard a body as a result of excessive slimming, as well as eating disorders. We can say geki-yase means slimmed bodies, but the bodies are contrary to each other in social valuation. What does the expression represent? Finally, we analyze the politics of geki-yase mainly from weekly magazine for women.

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From a medical point of view, the pregnant woman may be regarded as one who is “ill” in the sense of the Parson's theoretical model of the “sick role”. Rejecting this role, pregnant women often doubt professional discourse. The purpose here is to explore a little further into the problem of medical intervention which cuts off the relation between the subject and her body. This paper is primarily concerned with attempts made in “maternity homes” to bridge this dichotomy. It is because I believe that they offer the key to an understanding of the body's reconstruction that a pregnant woman needs. Some pregnant women regard maternity home as a place for recovering their independence.

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Some procedures by which a discriminatory relation is made an object and an unjust one is necessary for constituting it as a problem. The patterns of consciousness about human rights are closely related to the above procedures of making a discriminatory relation an object and an unjust one, respectively. Again, in each procedure, the pattern of a judgement differs according to the patterns of consciousness about human rights to construct the process of making the discriminatory relation a problem. So, it could be concluded that it is necessary to consider the patterns of consciousness about human rights in discussing the problem of a discriminatory relation.

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