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This paper explores certain regularities between social-structural and historical particulars. The particulars are drawn from the society and history of Brunei, an ancient Malay state in northwest Borneo. Since the center of my attention is theory, I shall merely refer the reader to my more extensive summary of the particulars in question.

Recent scholarship has put forward two distinct interpretations of the origins of modern national and communal identity in South Asia. One sees colonial modernity as a radical epistemological break and judges the content of pre-colonial pasts irrelevant for understanding modern politics. According to this view, modern identities are responses to colonial constructions of Asian 'tradition'. The other approach sees continuities between the late pre-colonial and early colonial periods. For these writers, the origins of modern national and communal identities lie not only in colonial interventions, but also in non-colonial eighteenth-century social formations and in early colonial interaction between the British and South Asians.

PurposeThis paper aims to present reasons why social classifications which use occupations should seek to adopt "specific" approaches which are tailored to the country, time period and gender of the subjects under study.Design/methodology/approachThe relative motivations for adopting a specific approach to social classifications are discussed and theoretical perspectives on specificity and empirical evidence on the contribution of specific approaches are reviewed. Also the practical costs of implementing specific social classifications are evaluated, and the authors' development of the "GEODE" data service (grid‐enabled occupational data environment), which seeks to assist this process, is discussed.FindingsSpecific approaches make a non‐trivial difference to the conclusions drawn from analyses of occupation‐based social classifications. It is argued that the GEODE service has reduced the practical challenges of implementing specific measures.Research limitations/implicationsThere remain conceptual and pragmatic challenges in working with specific occupation‐based social classifications. Non‐specific ("universal") measures are adequate for many purposes.Practical implicationsThe paper argues that there are few excuses for ignoring specific occupation‐based social classifications.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates that recent technological developments have shifted the balance in the long‐standing debate between universal and specific approaches to occupation‐based social classifications.

People readily use social categories in their daily interactions with others. Although many scholars have focused on social categorization, they have largely neglected the cognitive representation of stimuli as a basis of this process. The present work aims to determine what dimensions are commonly used to organize the social world. The main dimensions of the social mental map are extracted from sorting data pertaining to a wide variety of social stimuli. Dimensions reflecting conventionalism, age, gender, physical versus cognitive orientation, warmth, and deviance are revealed. Furthermore, we show important individual differences in the extent to which each of these dimensions are attended to. We also establish the stability and reliability of our findings in a follow-up and a replication study.