Until the IRA ceasefire in August 1994 Northern Ireland, which had just experienced its most severe year of violence in many years, seemed to have been a society unable to break out of its some 25-year cycle of violence which has claimed over 3,000 lives - a not inconsiderable toll in a population of 1.5 million. This situation appears to have changed now in light of the recent IRA ceasefire and the Joint Declaration of the Irish and British governments in Decemeber 1993. It is now the official policy of the British government that Northern Ireland may determine its own future within the limits of constitutional democracy. The Framework Document issued by the British and Irish governments on 22 February 1995 has provided a constitutional basis for the consolidation of peace. The principle of consent to secession will be enshrined for the first time in British Legislation. The most important provisions of the Framework Document are the creation of a new Northen Ireland Assembly with limited legislative powers, and end to the Republic's claims over Northern Ireland, a guarantee that the people of the province have the right to choose their own future in a referendum, increased cooperation between the Irish and British governments as well as the setting up of cross-border institutions.

This paper is an exploration of the socio-cultural cohesion of Europe in the context of the end of the cold war. The eastern European revolutions of 1989/90 undermined the cold war consensus of east and west both in the global and in the European contexts. Since the Second World War western Europe had been shaped in the image of the United States just as eastern Europe was shaped in the image of the USSR, The question now is whether there is a new European cultural identity given the obsolescence of the old dichotomy. Is it really meaningful to speak of the socio-cultural cohesion of Europe at all in the sense of an underlying European political culture, which provides legitimating norms capable of embracing west and east, and which is not reducible to the ethos of capitalism? I should like to formulate this in terms of the possibility of European identity itself being a significant cultural identity sui generis. I am emphasizing, then, the eastern European revolutions as European revolutions and asking the question: exactly what was European about them?

This book is about how every age invented the idea of Europe in the mirror of its own identity: Europe is as much an idea as it is a reality, but it is also a contested idea and it was in adversity that European identity was constructed as a dichotomy of Self and Other. The book analyses the origins and development of the idea of Europe as a social construction from the earliest times to the present. Its challenging thesis is that the European idea has lent itself to a politics of division and exclusion, which has been disguised by superficial notions of unity. The author traces the origins of, what he calls, the discourse of Europeanism to forces lying deep in European history such as the unifying and integrating myths of medieval Christendom, the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century nationalism whose world-views have exerted an enduring hold over the European idea. The idea of Europe, Dr Delanty argues, must be judged by how it treats its minorities and not by reference to ambivalent notions of unity. Above all there is a need for is to be linked to a new politics of collective responsibility based on post-national citizenship.

Considering the comprehensive school as a social system, this text examines how the ideals of comprehensive education are articulated, challenged and reproduced through social class and gender divisions within secondary education. Issues examined include: the results of streaming on middle and working class pupils; gender and its effect on deviants' value systems; teachers' gender stereotyping and ideologies; attitudes of anti-school pupils; subject option constructions; and sex roles in curriculum texts. Both teacher and pupil views are taken together with official school records are taken into account. The conclusion explains why many of the gender and social class divisions identified are, within the New Right's agenda for secondary education, likely to continue and flourish rather than be reduced.

Drug disasters from Thalidomide to Opren, and other less dramatic cases of drug injury, raise questions about whether the testing and control of medicines provides satisfactory protection for the public. In this revealing study, John Abrahan develops a theoretically challenging realist approach, in order to probe deeply into the work of scientists in the pharmaceutical industry and governmental drug regulatory authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the examination of contemporary controversial case studies, he exposes how the commercial interest of drug manufacturers are consistently given the benefit of the scientific doubts about medicine safety and effectiveness, over and above the best interests of patients.; A highly original combination of philosophical rigour, historical sensitivity and empirical depth enables the "black box" of industrial and government science to be opened up to critical scrutiny much more than in previous social scientific study. All major aspects of drug testing and regulation are considered, including pre- clinical animal tests, clinical trials and postmarketing surveillance of adverse drug reactions. The author argues that drug regulators are too dependent on pharmaceutical industry resources and expertise, and too divorced from public accountability. The problem of corporate bias is particularly severe in the UK, where regulatory decisions about medicine safety are shrouded in greater secrecy than in the US.; Since the purpose of drug regulation should be to maximize the safety and effectiveness of medicines for patients, the public needs and deserves policies to counteract corporate bias in drug testing and evaluation. John Abraham's realist analysis provides a robust basis for policy interventions at the institutional and legislative levels. He proposes that corporate bias could be reduced by more extensive freedom of information, greater autonomy of government scientists from pharmaceutical industry, the development of independent drug testing by the regulatory authority, increased patient representation on regulatory committees, and more frequent and thorough oversight of regulatory performance by the legislature. This book should be of interest to anyone who cares about how medicines should be controlled in modern society. It should prove particularly rewarding for students and researchers in the sociology of science and technology, science and medicines policy, medical sociologists, the medical and pharmaceutical professions, and consumer organizations.

Objective: To collect information from children and young people about their knowledge of and attitudes towards cancer and their understanding of health and health related behaviours to inform future health promotion work. Design: Questionnaire survey of 15-16 year olds, and interviews with play materials with 9-10 year old children. Setting: Six inner city, suburban, and rural schools. Subjects: 226 children aged 15-16 years and 100 aged 9-10 years. Main outcome measures: Knowledge about different types of cancer; beliefs about health; sources of information; quality of research data obtainable from young children about cancer and health. Results: Both samples knew most about lung cancer, but there was also some knowledge of breast and skin cancer and leukaemia. Smoking, together with pollution and other environmental factors, were seen as the dominant causes of cancer. Environmental factors were mentioned more often by the inner city samples. Television and the media were the most important sources of information. Young people were more worried about unemployment than about ill health. More than half the young people did not describe their health as good, and most said they did not have a healthy lifestyle. Children were able to provide detailed information about their knowledge and understanding by using drawings as well as interviews. Conclusions: Children and young people possess considerable knowledge about cancer, especially about lung cancer and smoking, and show considerable awareness of predominant health education messages. Despite this knowledge, many lead less than healthy lifestyles. Health is not seen as the most important goal in life by many young people; the circumstances in which many children and young people live are not experienced as health promoting.

The production and reception of scientific papers in the academic-industrial complex have been neglected in sociology. In this article the social processes which influence the nature of the scientific paper in that complex are explored in depth by taking a number of controversial medical papers as case studies. The empirical evidence is collected and discussed in the light of sociological theories of normative ethos, paradigm development, reward-induced conformity and social interests in science. It is concluded that within the medical-industrial complex conformity to industrial interests can be a major criterion in defining the kind of reception given to a scientific paper and the professional autonomy of the authors in the paper's production, rather than an ethos of scientific scepticism or commitment to paradigmatic conventions. This is seen to have implications for the production of scientific knowledge - implications that might be in conflict with the public interest. Consequently, the desirability of current British Government proposals to intensify its policy of making science more responsive to the needs of industry may have significant drawbacks, hitherto unacknowledged in official circles, and in need of more extensive sociological investigation.

Theories of pain have traditionally been dominated by biomedicine and concentrate upon its neurophysiological aspects, both in diagnosis and treatment. Hence, scientific medicine reduces the experience of pain to an elaborate broadcasting system of signals, rather than seeing it as moulded and shaped both by the individual and their particular socio-cultural context. Although pain lies at the intersection between biology and culture, making it an obvious topic for sociological investigation, scant attention has been paid to understanding beliefs about pain within the study of health and illness. A major impediment to a more adequate conceptualisation of pain is due to the manner in which it has been `medicalised, resulting in the inevitable Cartesian split between body and mind. Consequently, the dominant conceptualisation of pain has focused upon sensation, with the subsequent inference that it is able to be rationally and objectively measured. Yet as well as being a medical `problem, pain is an everyday experience. Moreover, sociological and phenomenological approaches to pain would add to, and enhance, existing bodies of knowledge and help to reclaim pain from the dominant scientific paradigm. In this paper, it is argued, firstly, that the elevation of sensation over emotion within medico-psychological approaches to pain, can be shown to be limiting and reductionist. Secondly, we attempt to show how insights from the newly-emerging sociological arenas of emotions and embodiment provide a framework which is able to both transcend the divide between mind and body and to develop a phenomenological approach to pain. Finally, in order to bring the meaning of pain into fuller focus, we draw attention to the importance of studying theodices and narratives, as well as the cultural shaping and patterning of beliefs and responses to pain.

During the Cold War period European identity was largely secured by the notion of the West; despite its lofty ideals it was a Cold War construct shaped and defined by the global confrontation of capitalism and communism. Europe was secure in its identity as the eastern frontier of the United States. Today, however, European identity is being redefined, but the terms of its redefinition are uncertain. With the collapse of the old bi-polar constructs of West versus East, the European idea is becoming the focus for a new struggle for hegemony in what is coming to be increasingly recognized as a multi-polar world.
The problem I address in this article is the normative foundations of European identity. More fundamentally this is related to the question whether we in fact need a European identity, particularly if this is to be another totalising idea in the grand style of Christendom, the West, Modernity, the Nation. Integral to this critique is a concern with the possibility of post-national collective identity as the basis of a new kind of identity. Is European identity just another ideological construct in the increasingly international stage of politics? Or does it represent a genuine attempt to come to terms with the problem of the crisis of identity in the modern polity?