Search results

In this article I discuss just why travel takes place. Why does travel occur, especially with the development of new communications technologies? I unpack how corporeal proximity in diverse modes appears to make travel necessary and desirable. I examine how aspects of conversational practice and of `meetings' make travel obligatory for sustaining `physical proximity'. I go on to consider the roles that travel plays in social networks, using Putnam's recent analysis of social capital. The implications of different kinds of travel for the distribution of such social capital are spelled out. I examine what kinds of corporeal travel are necessary and appropriate for a rich and densely networked social life across various social groups. And in the light of these analyses of proximity and social capital, virtual travel will not in a simple sense substitute for corporeal travel, since intermittent co-presence appears obligatory for many forms of social life. However, virtual travel does seem to produce a strange and uncanny life on the screen that is near and far, present and absent, and it may be that this will change the very nature of what is experienced as `co-presence'. I conclude by showing how issues of social inclusion and exclusion cannot be examined without identifying the complex, overlapping and contradictory mobilities necessarily involved in the patterning of an embodied social life.

Across much of the globe over the past decade two of the most powerful organising processes have been those of citizenship' and globalisation'. They have swept much else before them, reconstituting social and political life. In the case of citizenship, movements to demand rights of national citi-zenship have been enormously powerful in one continent after another. This demand for the rights of the citizen, and for the institutions of civil society, occurred most strikingly within former Eastern Europe. 1989 in many ways represents the year of the citizen, falling, as it does, some two hundred years after the subjects of Paris took to the streets in 1789, demanding themselves to be citizens (see Murdock 1992). Garton Ash argues that during the 1980s, across many diverse societies, people: 'wanted to be citizens, individual men and women with dignity and responsibility, with rights but also with duties, freely associating in civil society' (1990: 148).

Considers five conceptual innovations in the analysis of social class that represent departures from conventional Marxism: (1) the notion of causal powers; (2) the strategic character of collective action; (3) the need to examine resources available to social classes; (4) the dialectic of class structure & struggle; & (5) the significance of space & place to the formation & reproduction of class actions. An event-ontology is argued against in favor of a "thing-ontology," meaning that there are enduring structures in time & space that persist because of their causal powers. Class formations thus are explored for particular social characteristics embedded within enabling (through causal powers of institutions & social groupings) as well as constraining structures. Attention is drawn to the US service class, competing actors for whom collective action has become a strategic vehicle. 18 References. C. Mariani

This paper provides an analysis of a relatively unusual topic, namely, the social divisions surrounding the consumption of tourist-related services. In the first section a number of points are made which suggest that the topic is both important and difficult to analyse. Some attention is paid to the features of the tourist gaze. In the second main section the problems brought up by various economists of congestion and positionality are analysed. It is suggested that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the romantic and the collective tourist gaze which makes the issue of congestion/positionality more complex than economists have suggested. Some sociological implications of this distinction are developed in the final concluding section. `Tourists are vulgar, vulgar, vulgar' (Henry James, quoted Pearce and Moscardo 1986:21)