Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. There is a state‐system: a palpable nexus of practice and institutional stucture centred in government and more or less extensive, unified and dominant in any given society. There is, too, a state‐idea, projected, purveyed and variously believed in in different societies at different times. We are only making difficulties for ourselves in supposing that we have also to study the state ‐ an entity, agent, function or relation over and above the state‐system and the state‐idea. The state comes into being as a stucturation within political practice; it starts its life as an implicit construct; it is then reified ‐ as the res publica, the public reification, no less ‐ and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice. The ideological function is extended to a point where conservatives and radicals alike believe that their practice is not directed at each other but at the state: the world of illusion prevails. The task of the sociologist is to demystify; and in this context that means attending to the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does.'When the state itself it is danger', Lord Denning said in his judgment yesterday, "our cherished freedoms may have to take second place, and even natural justice itself may have to suffer a setback'.'The flaw in Lord Denning's argument is that it is the government who decide what the interests of the state should be and which invokes 'national security' as the state chooses to define it', Ms Pat Hewitt, director of the National Council for Civil Liberties, said yesterday'.

Recent discussion and policy have tended to separate the problem of procuring research competence from consideration of the nature and purposes of sociology and to pursue it with close reference to the presumed needs of various possible users of research. This paper argues that sociologists should set their own consideration of the issue firmly within the framework of a commitment to the intellectual problems and purposes of sociology as a discipline. And that if that is done suitable educational strategies for promoting competence can be revised; a possible strategy focussed on undergraduate work and the Ph.D. is outlined. It is suggested that the real problem is not that of competence but certain unrealistic expectations hidden in the demand for usefulness.

To those with a passion for conceptual tidiness the whole field of social care must be exceptionally frustrating; within that field community care is perhaps the least tidy corner. A convenient and in some ways useful definition would see community care as a matter of the provision of help, support and protection to others by lay members of societies acting in everyday domestic and occupational settings. It could thus be distinguished from some of the other main froms of social care – institutional care, institutional treatment and community treatment – by both its typical agents and its typical milieux. The agents of community care are unspecialized and the milieux are open; both are socially given rather than administratively constructed. The distinction could be summarized figurately thus:
Any such distinction at once makes three things apparent.
1. Community care, even defined in this fairly extreme manner, is not an impossibility. We know of social systems in which effective care is provided by lay persons in socially open settings on a comprehensive and continuous basis. The most remarkable instance is possibly the Japanese tsukiai reported by Dore.