This study focuses upon the military professional strategies that have evolved in the context of the tension between the different rationalities of war-time organisation and a peace-time military establishment. In a case study of the Swedish army's officers corps' disciplinary designs during the years 1901-1978, a dominating garrison-mechanical approach is identified. This approach was consolidated in the interwar period, and followed efforts to reactivate a traditional Swedish military paternalism. The garrison-mechanical approach can be said to have involved a fusion of docility-creating techniques (especially formal drill) with a social quarantine made possible by a new barrack system. In an unproblematic fashion, it appeared as a formula for creating certainty in interbureaucratic relations as well as for establishing systematic control over conscripts. Furthermore, it was seen as a formula for the infusion of a firm, war-time relevant discipline. The garrison-mechanical approach was challenged, on the one hand, by the influx of external war reports, and, on the other hand, by the break of routine that the military preparations during World War II implied. However, the approach did not lose its dominant position until there were serious institutional pressures for adaption characteristic of the post World War II period. During these years, especially group-manipulative strategies of control - with claims of war- as well as peace-time relevancy - obtained foothold.

Contemporary family life and intimate relationships are characterised by an increasing diversity. A common feature for several of the new family forms is not just a more open and flexible concept of the family, but also a significant spatial flexibility: a household no longer necessarily embraces what people with mutual commitments define as their family. By seizing on the multi-household nature of new family forms, research into the differentiation of family life can achieve a more unified analysis. But the aim of the article is also to demonstrate how new combinations of families and households can be analysed in terms of a response to changes in gender relations that have occurred in recent decades. The point of departure is two new family forms, typical of two different age cohorts, namely the LAT-relationships (Living Apart Together) of the young-elderly consisting of long term intimate relationships in which partners retain their own households, and divorced parents, often in early middle age, who experiment with forms of custody which mean that their children spend approximately the same amount of time in each household. In both cases it is possible to maintain that challenges to socially accepted perceptions of gender involve the transgression of socially accepted configurations of the family and household.

During his work on Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der Modernen Demokratie (1911) Robert Michels was exposed to the rival influences of Weber and Italian theories of elites. At the same time, he moved from an emphasis on a syndicalistic critique of democracy in the labour movement to a determinedly sceptical attitude to democracy. The inconsistencies in Michels' magnum opus resulted in a complex political as well as scientific reception of the Iron Law of Oligarchy in Sweden between 1911 and 1920. For the conservative and nationalistic Young Right, Michels' book illustrated the nature of parliamentary government and the party system as simply veiled oligarchy. The Young Right, thereby, seized on the aspects in Michels' work dealing with the theory of elites, though the differences between Michels and the Young Right are at the same time crucial. For Michels party oligarchies were a problem of democracy, whereas for the Young Right they were a national question; modern party politics hides and distracts from the interests of the nation. Dispite these differentb points of departure, Michels and the Young Right develop a similar discussion about how the "quantitative" feature of democracy can be replaced by a more "qualitative" form of government. For the Young Right the nation could be saved by an authoritarian, corporative form of government, and in time Michels found in fascism an alternative to a "hypocritical" and "ineffective" democracy. The Left within the Social Democratic Party also seized in Michels' work. However, the Left did not seek a general theory in it but rather a diagnosis of the condition of the labour movement. Under the general concept of oligarchy the left was able to collect its criticism of the Social Democratic Party's methods of exploiting the new parliamentary opportunities that arose in this period. As the opposition between the left and right wings of the party intensified, the Left moved closer to the sceptical attitudes to democracy contained in Zur Soziologie des Partewesens. Gustaf Steffen, a sociologist, and during the first part of the decade a Social Democratic senator, tried, in a polemic against both the Left and Michels, to provide a 'scientific basis' for the Social Democratic Party position. Steffen's contribution strongly emphasised the importance of the right of freedom of action for elected representatives, a tendency which was strengthened when Steffen became pro-German, as did the Young Right, during the First World War. Steffen's sociology was subordinated to both the desire to revise the doctrines of the Social Democratic Party and a critique of the entente powers.

Kin relationships do not exist independently of people's interpretative practices. The routinization of divorce and remarriage, new reproductive technologies, and the genesis of gay families has made kin relationships increasingly diverse and flexible. Based on an examination of recent anthropological and sociological studies of kinship in late modernity, this aryicle analyses the heterogenous patterns of meaning attached to contemporary kinship. In one respect these interpretative practices represents discontinuity. The accumulated adjustments in the meaning of kinship can be seen as part of a reflexive achievement of intimacy, that is, the perforation of kinship by friendship. However, in another respect, the more or less voluntary relations which constitute new forms of kin can, nevertheless, be seen to represent a significant continuity. This continuity is not simply about how kinship - however defined - retains an important role in our lives. Above all, it is about transforming friendship into kinship in order to achieve the security of social relationships traditionally associated with such ties.