This paper seeks to explore the issues and concerns that impact upon girls' and boys' friendship groups as they transfer from primary to secondary school. Using the girls' and boys' own voices, we document the extent to which their existing social relationships are disrupted as they adapt to and engage with a new school setting. Through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires conducted in the final year of primary school and the first year of secondary school, we identify students' concerns regarding their attitudes to friendship. We consider the extent to which account is taken of this aspect of children's friendships and explore and analyse commonalities and differences in their responses. We argue that the priorities of our student groups are different to those advocated by the school. We further attempt to examine how the girls and boys in our sample negotiate their new environment. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. IntroductionThe transition from primary to secondary school was loaded with added significance as my struggle to mask terror coincided with recognition of deeper existential fears. Sitting in my bed at night and literally shaking with fear. The first time I realised my own mortality is a resonant memory of my childhood, waking up when everyone else is asleep and feeling my stomach churn . . . the loss of the social milieu of the primary school, the demands of integration into a potentially hostile peer group in itself provoked deeply held fears of annihilation (Tuddenham, 1997: 2).Transferring from primary to secondary school is a key rite of passage for boys and girls, as they move from the seemingly familiar and safe environment of the primary school, to the unfamiliar and strange surroundings of the secondary school. During this transitional phase of schooling, children have to learn to read, negotiate and adapt to a very different school culture. Such a cultural shift includes meeting different teachers, adapting to a variety of teaching styles, a broader range of curricula, bigger and unfamiliar buildings and a far greater emphasis on regulatory measures. In addition, children find themselves repositioned as the youngest in the school, and This paper considers students' gendered attitudes to friendship, in terms of commonalities and differences at the point of transition from primary to secondary school. It has only been in relatively recent times that the perspective of boys' and girls' experience of transfer from one phase of schooling to the next has begun to be explored (Galton and Willcocks, 1983; School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), 1996). Until this time research into primary school transfer tended to concern itself with the organisational arrangements, for example assessment procedures and selection, with the importance of friendship within this process of transfer being marginal to concerns of academic attainment and curricula demands. We would argue however, that the perspective brought by both girls and boys lays far greater emphasis on the importance of ...

This article is in many ways a pragmatist critique of pragmatism in IR, focusing on what practices scholars have mainly engaged in by drawing upon pragmatism and how to resolve problems that arise in considering them. Numerous scholars of international relations have drawn upon pragmatism to examine issues of interest to the field, largely (though not exclusively) of an epistemological or methodological nature, focusing mainly on pragmatism as a philosophy of science. Often overlooked, however, is that pragmatism is not just a philosophy of science but a distinctive and in some respects quite radical school of metaphysics, and it implies a particularly flexible form of social ontology. I thus argue for broader horizons in pragmatist theory in IR. I criticise the overly epistemological or methodological focus of the existing ways many IR scholars have used pragmatism, and discuss of how pragmatist social theory fits within existing scholarship in the field. Finally, I suggest how pragmatist social theory can contribute to ongoing IR research programmes by dissolving the dualisms of agent and structure, realism and idealism, and normative and strategic action. In other words, as a fairly coherent set of principles, pragmatism offers the foundations for a new movement in the study of international politics-indeed, such a movement has already begun, and I suggest that its horizons are particularly broad.

Faced with scepticism about the status of grand theory in International Relations, scholars are re-evaluating Kenneth Waltz’s contribution to theoretical debates in the field. Readers of Waltz have variously recast his work as structural functionalist, scientific realist and classical realist in liberal clothing. We contribute to this re-evaluation by systematically assembling misreadings of Waltz that continue to occur across all of International Relations’ schools — that his theory is positivist, rationalist and materialist — and offering a coherent synthesis of his main contributions to International Relations theory. By linking Theory of International Politics to both Man, the State, and War and Waltz’s post-1979 clarifications, we show that Waltz offers International Relations scholars a coherent vision of the worth and method of grand theory construction that is uniquely ‘international’. In particular, we focus on Waltz’s methodology of theory building and use of images, demonstrating these to be underappreciated but crucially important aspects of Waltz’s work. We finish by proposing methodological, practical and pedagogical ‘takeaways’ for International Relations scholars that emerge from our analysis.

Normativity matters in international politics, but IR scholarship will benefit from de-reifying ‘norms’ as units into a relational, configurational alternative. The alternative I propose here is the ‘normative configuration’: an arrangement of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value-orientation, and avenues of contestation. This responds to recent constructivist scholarship, particularly from relational sociology and practice theory, that implies the need for ontological and analytical alternatives to ‘norms’ as central concepts responsible for establishing rules, institutions, and values in social life. I offer a way of conceptualizing and analyzing normativity consistent with these alternative approaches. Namely, I have brought together a pragmatist theory of action with the social theories of a number of key relational social theorists and philosophers, oriented around a reading of what norms-talk actually does for social enquiry. I then outline a three stage process – de-reification, attributing agency, and tracing transactions – that allows scholars to study transformations in normative configurations. Finally, I discuss what this contributes to the recent turns toward practices and relations, as the latest direction in constructivist scholarship within the discipline.

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