Too often study of communicative and cultural processes makes `gratuitous assumptions' about media and collective identities like national identity. This article is a critical engagement with Michael Billig's notion of `banal nationalism', a rare analysis of everyday media rhetoric and nationalism. It does this through a survey of daily newspapers sold in Scotland. Newspapers are plotted according to an index of semantic assumptions they make about where the spatial centre of national communication lies. The newspapers surveyed cluster into three broad national types, ranging from an indigenous Scottish press, Scottish editions of English-based papers, `tabloid interlopers' and the English-based broadsheets. The article argues that Billig's emphasis on the `big state' nationalism of the USA and the UK restricts the analytical scope of `banal nationalism' when studying newspaper rhetoric in a `stateless nation' like Scotland.

Class has become the social condition that dare not it speak its name in the devolved Scotland. This is despite the persistence of marked class divisions and structured inequalities within contemporary Scottish society. We critically examine the most empirically sophisticated and coherent analysis of social class in Scotland, that provided by 'the Edinburgh school' of social scientists, particularly their claim that Scotland is now a prosperous, 'professional society' where only a small but significant minority are trapped in poverty. This paper further considers the extent to which 'devolution', and the dominant 2 representations to which it has given rise, serve to generate a series of other myths in which class is both devalued but simultaneously mobilised in the negative portrayal of some of the most disadvantaged sections of the working class. Against an emerging, home-grown view of 'New Scotland' as a prosperous 'Smart, Successful Scotland', poverty and wealth inequalities continue to be a necessary feature of the division of labour. In Scotland, as elsewhere, class remains the pivot-point around which much of social policy is encoded and enacted.

The implications of the 2011 Scottish election and the proposed referendum on Scottish independence for the future of social policy across the devolved UK are profound but far from certain. It is crucial to understand not only the historical nature of this conjuncture but to develop an adequate conceptual understanding of the place of social policy in the dialectic between state and nation in Scotland. To this end, we critically examine theories that depict Scotland as an essentially 'stateless nation' in the light of recent developments. In so doing, we examine the implications for social policy of the changing character of statehood in Scotland, the nature of civil nationalism, and the problem of legitimacy in Scotland for the UK as a multinational state. As the architecture of statehood is re-negotiated, strong centrifugal pressures are being created for a more distinct divergence of social policy in Scotland from the rest of the UK regardless of the outcome of the independence referendum. Policy-making is ensnared in a series of tensions, not just between Westminster and Holyrood but also, more broadly, tensions between competing principles of social justice and territorial justice, and competing demands between welfare nationalism and competitive nationalism.

In 1904 and 1905 Patrick Geddes (1905, 1906) read his famed, but today little-read, two-part paper, ‘Civics: as Applied Sociology’, to the first meetings of the British Sociological Society. Geddes is often thought of as a ‘pioneer of sociology’ (Mairet, 1957;Meller, 1990) and for some (egDevine, 1999: 296) as ‘a seminal influence on sociology’. However, little of substance has been written to critically assess Geddes's intellectual legacy as a sociologist. His work is largely forgotten by sociologists in Britain (Abrams, 1968;Halliday, 1968;Evans, 1986). Few have been prepared to follow Geddes's ambition to bridge the chasm between nature and culture, environment and society, geography, biology and sociology. His conception of ‘sociology’, oriented towards social action from a standpoint explicitly informed by evolutionary theory. A re-appraisal of the contemporary relevance of Geddes's thinking on civics as applied sociology has to venture into the knotted problem of evolutionary sociology. It also requires giving some cogency to Geddes's often fragmentary and inconsistent mode of address. Although part of a post-positivist, ‘larger modernism’ Geddes remained mired in nineteenth century evolutionary thought and fought shy of dealing with larger issues of social class or the breakthrough work of early twentieth century sociology of Simmel, Weber and Durkheim. His apolitical notion of ‘civics’ limits its relevance to academic sociology today.

Many accounts of the rise and decline of neoliberalism forefront its ideological nature and capacity for hegemonic leadership. In contrast, I argue that outside of elite groups neoliberalism did not become hegemonic in Gramsci's sense of a ‘national-popular’ force. Neoliberalism is a convenient term to describe a two-stage process of ‘purifying’ the coercive nature of the capital relation through what Gramsci broadly called ‘a war of movement’ in the 1970s and 1980s and ‘a war of position’ in the 1990s and 2000s. This double-movement compelled credit-worthy individuals to routinely market, sell, purchase and perform for money-wages. New techniques of the self were perfected in the marketised war of position to service the credit-led financialisation of everyday life. Social positionings dependent on financialisation are now subject to a ‘crisis of authority’.