ABSTRACT

The paradox of inequality posits that individuals in high-inequality societies paradoxically exhibit stronger meritocratic beliefs, perceiving their societies as systems that reward individuals based on ability and effort rather than social background or connections. This study presents an explanation from the perspective of critical sociology of education, complementing prior research that offers community contextual and psychosocial insights. By analysing the ISSP 2019 dataset, which includes 29 countries or regions, we find that in countries or regions with high income inequality, education serves to legitimise inequality and diminishes individuals' awareness of the structural factors contributing to inequality. Conversely, in those with low inequality, while basic education also functions to legitimise inequality, advanced stages of education possess an enlightening character that enables individuals to be more aware of the structural factors that lead to inequality. Generally, by estimating the interactions between education and country-level income inequality, this study elucidates the factors contributing to the paradox of inequality and reconciles the persistent argument between legitimisation and enlightenment theories of education.

ABSTRACT

This article examines civil society organisations working to enhance social mobility in England, especially through higher education. Against the backdrop of neoliberal governance, we investigate whether these organisations operate as protective counter-movements resisting marketisation or as institutional mechanisms that stabilise the inequalities they aim to address. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's concept of the ‘double movement’ and Nancy Fraser's critique of marketised social protections, we map and analyse over 100 charities and non-profits established since 1992. We combined qualitative coding of organisational websites across nine Fraserian dimensions with Latent Profile Analysis to identify structural patterns within the field. Findings reveal that most organisations balance critical framings of inequality with funder-compatible, technocratic delivery models. We argue this structural ambivalence is a defining feature of civil society under neoliberalism and show how the social mobility industry operates to suggest symbolic reform without redistributive transformation. Our contribution is threefold: we provide the first systematic typology of the UK's social mobility sector, extend Polanyi and Fraser's theoretical frameworks into social mobility and education policy, and offer a methodological model combining qualitative and quantitative methods with AI-assisted research.

ABSTRACT

While there is a growing body of literature examining platform dependence and its implications for mental health, much of the research has focused on gig workers with small sample sizes. The lack of large-scale quantitative research, particularly using longitudinal representative data, limits a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic relationship between platform dependence and mental distress. This study uses nationally representative data from the UK and fixed effects models to explore the heterogeneity of gig work, specifically examining differences in mental distress between high-dependence workers (those solely engaged in gig work) and low-dependence workers (those also employed in other jobs). The findings reveal that high-dependence gig workers have greater mental distress compared to low-dependence and full-time workers, with their mental well-being similar to those with no paid work. Low-dependence gig workers have lower mental distress than those without paid work. Financial precarity and loneliness partly explain these differences, with the impact stronger for highly educated high-dependence workers and less educated low-dependence workers. These findings highlight the significance of recognizing the heterogeneity of gig work in addressing future well-being challenges in a post-pandemic economy, as well as broadening the scope of the latent deprivation model to encompass the unique dynamics of gig work.

ABSTRACT

In 2023, China introduced regulatory amendments to birth certificates and the hukou (household registration) system, aiming to boost birth rates and offset an aging population. However, the implications of these changes on marriage and family support amidst population policy shifts remain underexplored. One particular area is how commercial surrogacy (CS) impacts gay communities where couples seek surrogate children to maintain intergenerational bonding and bridging within their familial and kinship networks. This article employs Bourdieu's field theory, characterized by class-based capital and habitus, to examine how upper-class gay individuals navigate this changing field in the three municipal cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 35 upper-class gay fathers and 21 gays' parents, their agency and changes in pursuing parenthood through transnational and underground CS in China are illustrated. This article posits that the formation of the family is inherently tied to the class-based cultural capital and habitus of the gay individuals. The reproductive decision-making process within the gay community reflect strategies to form families are imbued with class-based capital and habitus.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 4, Page 937-938, September 2025.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 4, Page 932-936, September 2025.

ABSTRACT

Pro-environmental attitudes are more prevalent among the affluent and educated, both across and within societies. However, the underpinnings of this pattern remain debated. Some scholars view environmental engagement as a politics of prosperity, emerging among groups whose material needs are sufficiently met to prioritize non-material concerns. Others interpret ecological commitment as a form of symbolic distinction, reinforcing social hierarchies. A third line of research suggests that a new ecological habitus has developed among high-cultural-capital groups. Building on a detailed mapping of environmental attitudes across social space, I advance an alternative interpretation. Against the prosperity hypothesis, I show that it is not the materially wealthiest who are most pro-environmental, but rather those rich in cultural capital. Nuancing the ecological distinction thesis, I argue that pro-green commitments among these groups reflect not only downward status signalling but also symbolic opposition to economic capital within the dominant class. And contrary to the claim of an ecological habitus, I find that ecological commitments among the culturally privileged are more selective and inconsistent than a genuinely transformed habitus would imply. Instead, I propose that pro-environmental views among those rich in cultural capital express a broader symbolic rejection of the money, wealth, and materialism associated with economic capital. This interpretation is reinforced by the close alignment between pro-environmental attitudes and anti-materialist cultural tastes—a pattern that explains much of the observed association between cultural capital and green position-takings.

ABSTRACT

Recent years witnessed mass migration towards Europe, from Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the 2015 Migrant Crisis linked to war in Syria. This article explores UK government discussion around these two significant crises, focussing on the challenges they present and the portrayal of refugees. It asks how far ministers' language differentiated between Ukrainians and Syrians regarding welfare deservingness. Thematically analysing over 100 official speeches, statements and press releases, the extent of racialisation and welfare chauvinism in ministers' discourse on refugees is revealed. Clear racialisation was found between the two refugee groups, but welfare chauvinism persisted for Ukrainians despite more favourable language, reflecting continued conditionality within UK government discussions of migration phenomena that may hold long-term implications for Ukrainian refugees in the UK.

ABSTRACT

Although cocaine use is rising among youth in many countries, little is known about the social context and its influence on this new pattern of use. Drawing on a theoretical framework of class, gender, and peer-status dynamics and extensive data from personal interviews, we investigate how cocaine use is culturally situated and socially organised in certain Norwegian high school cultures. The focal sample consists of study participants who stated that they had used cocaine. They totalled 32 persons, of whom 28 were boys. We identify four key cultural characteristics linked to cocaine use: (i) affluence: users often had backgrounds rich in economic capital; (ii) a party-centred culture: cocaine was introduced in contexts with excessive partying and binge drinking; (iii) top-level networks: cocaine use was linked to exclusive social networks, based in Norwegian high school graduation celebrations; and (iv) masculinity: boys used more cocaine than girls, to boost their energy and self-confidence. We conclude that the key driver of cocaine use is a structurally determined socialisation pattern, which we theorise as a ‘top-boy’ culture. This culture is anchored in status-seeking elite school milieus characterised by affluence, heavy partying, and exclusive homosocial networks. Boys invested in this culture may engage in cocaine use to signal membership and to mimic the hallmark of ‘ease’, in accordance with a rather orthodox type of masculinity. Whereas youth cultures often represent pockets of resistance to traditional hierarchies, this culture instead seems to strengthen such established hierarchical arrangements.

ABSTRACT

How do free spaces become radicalizing spaces? Studies of far-right radicalism have highlighted the role of insulated movement spaces in radicalizing their members. In these spaces, participants can flaunt their radical ideas and infuse them into everyday practices, forming these ideas into comprehensive and resilient worldviews. However, the salience of radical ideas in free spaces has also been found to be inconsistent and rare. This contrast makes it unclear when and how exactly free spaces contribute to the spread and persistence of radical ideas. Drawing on a 4-year ethnographic study of a radical right-wing libertarian movement in the US, this study shows how activists both highlight and downplay radical ideas creatively to solve situationally emergent challenges of coordinating action. Thus, while the movement's free spaces created circumstances that imbued some everyday mundane practices with radical political significance, they also facilitated an opposite process: they created conditions that obscured or even undermined the political meaning of otherwise radical practices. As I argue, rather than stifling the spread of radical ideas, this banalization of radical practices is a critical component of the radicalization process itself, allowing activists to coordinate radical action among a diverse group of people and across varying situations. In this way, free spaces contribute to the coordination of radical action, even among participants who do not necessarily express radical political motivations. Thus, the findings show how people's motivations for radical action are often articulated in the moment, in response to specific situations and the challenges they present.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 4, Page 943-944, September 2025.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 4, Page 941-942, September 2025.

ABSTRACT

Afropessimism is a critical framework that is often used to analyse anti-Black violence and its deep entrenchment within systems and structures that perpetuate Black subjugation. By conceptualising Black life as ‘non-life’, afropessimism examines how anti-Black violence shapes health disparities, influencing who is deemed worthy of care and underscoring the systemic nature of this (d)evaluation. This framework holds significant potential for anti-racist efforts that aim to address Black health disparities by exposing their root causes. However, afropessimism's central claim—that Black people are not only excluded from the category of the ‘human’ but are also positioned as its antithesis—poses challenges for anti-racist strategies focussed on affirming recognitions of Black humanity to achieve health equity. This paper critically investigates the role of afropessimism in anti-racist health promotion by examining divergent perspectives within its schools of thought. While all scholars who use afropessimist frameworks critically interrogate the systemic inequities that harm Black populations, they differ in their views on the potential for Black life within and beyond current anti-Black systems and structures. These differences lead to varying implications for advancing anti-racist health initiatives and promoting health justice through afropessimism. By analysing how afropessimism may inform anti-racist health frameworks, this paper explores how its distinct theoretical perspectives can enrich, challenge, and constrain efforts to dismantle racial health inequities.

ABSTRACT

While education is essential for employability, people with disabilities often face barriers such as inadequate accommodations and limited access to adaptive technologies, hindering their equitable labor market participation. This research addresses these challenges by analyzing the roles of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalization in the relationship between educational attainment and employability among people with disabilities in 33 high-income countries from 2010 to 2022. Using a moderated moderation model, the study evaluates how AI and digitalization jointly influence the relationship between education levels and employment outcomes. The analysis employs the Hayes PROCESS macro with bootstrapped confidence intervals to ensure robustness and accuracy in estimating interaction effects. The findings demonstrate that education significantly enhances employment prospects for individuals with disabilities, with stronger effects observed at intermediate and advanced education levels. AI serves as a critical moderator, amplifying the positive impact of education by creating adaptive learning environments and fostering essential technical and transversal skills. Digitalization complements this role by providing the infrastructure necessary to integrate AI into education systems, broadening access to resources, and enabling flexible learning opportunities. The study further identifies a moderated moderation effect, where the combined influence of AI and digitalization significantly strengthens the effect of education on employability for disabled people. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI and digitalization in improving education quality and fostering labor market inclusion for persons with disabilities in an increasingly digitalized world.

ABSTRACT

There is a variety of conceptions of the public role that sociology ought to play. Perhaps the most common one presents it as serving a critical or oppositional function, not least in relation to governments and their policies. Yet this has by no means always been the dominant conception of sociology's role. In his well-known typology, Michael Burawoy recognised ‘professional’ and ‘policy’ versions of the discipline, alongside ‘critical’ and ‘public’ ones. However, even this does not capture the full range of variation in view about sociology's public role. There can be divergencies within each of Burawoy's categories. And it is worth taking account of these in order to gain a clear sense of all the possibilities. In this spirit, what is offered here is an examination of contrasting approaches that would fall under Burawoy's heading of policy sociology. These come from two key figures who had considerable influence on twentieth-century social and political thought—Karl Mannheim and Karl Popper. While they both believed that the function of social science is to serve government policymaking, and both were committed to democracy, they took very different views about sociology's relationship to governance. Indeed, Popper sharply criticised Mannheim's position, condemning it as totalitarian. The issues these authors addressed remain of considerable significance today, and this paper explores what can be learnt from their differences in perspective, as well as from what they shared.

ABSTRACT

This article presents an ethnographic study of middle-aged and older female direct care workers (DCWs) with rural origins working in a Shanghai nursing home, examining how they do gendered and classed age—experience age in relation to gender and class experiences—in everyday lives. Although these women often do conformist age upon entering the elder care industry due to the constraints of their positions in the Chinese re/productive labour market, they leverage the polysemic implications of their age, employing extensive caregiving experiences honed through long-held gendered roles to excel at work. Originating from rural areas, some are compelled by limited social resources to undo age through maintaining youthful productivity and focusing on self-development amid China's neoliberal care economy. The post-COVID-19 era has intensified their workload, leading them acquiesce to old age. Yet, working as a DCW in Shanghai offers them a youthful aging lifestyle (undoing class) and freedom from domestic burdens reminiscent of their youth (undoing gender), thereby creating an age paradox. This article enriches care worker literature by addressing the often-overlooked aspect of age and challenges the implicit assumption in sporadic discussions of care workers' age, where it is often treated as a demographic control variable, that individuals within the same age category share similar age-related experiences. By elucidating the diverse ways gender and class are used to do age, and vice versa, this study contributes to gender and social gerontology scholarship. It advances the understanding of marginalized older women's experiences as not rigidly determined by intersectional forces in an additive manner, but instead multiplicative, fluid, and context-dependent through their engagement in doing gendered and classed age, reflecting their dynamic jeopardy beyond the narrow portrayal of misery. This article also enhances our understanding of the global care crisis by offering a nuanced perspective on aging and care work.

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with how nationalism is convened and condensed in this moment by exploring the function of loss and death and their centrality to nationalism's articulation. The discussion attempts to make sense of how death possesses an ideological currency that wields an alluring quality and equips nationalism with a moral imperative. This focus is stimulated by the abundant rhetoric which draws on real, mythologised and metaphorical deaths, to imply the ‘killing off’ of our communities, our industrial heartlands, our values, our nation, etc., and which has been a perennial feature of English nationalisms but which has intensified since the Brexit campaigns, their enduring legacy and the general move to the right. The racialised dimensions of these arguments are recognised as vital to reveal the close imbrication of the narration of race, class and nation and the various claims made through their articulation with death, including how this underpins who is worth saving and not. Indeed, the key aim of the paper is to demonstrate nationalism's capacity to simultaneously produce the moral imperative for sacrifice for authentic (often white working class) subjects and the brutal abandonment of racialised ‘others’ for the sake of the longevity of the nation. In short, it seeks to better understand how lives are said to matter and not, especially in times of economic hardship. I propose that the integrity of the nation claims to be reliant on the sacrifices of the, implicitly white working-class ‘left behind’ via austerity, Brexit and beyond, but that this is simultaneously contingent on the brutal abandonment of racialised others.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 4, Page 945-946, September 2025.

ABSTRACT

While pubs have long been celebrated as a quintessential part of British culture, the ongoing and increasingly rapid closure of British pubs has raised concerns about the impacts of their loss on the wider cultural life and identity of the nation. The article explores how pub closures are narrated in British print news media through the analysis of a sample of news stories spanning 2000–2023. Time series analysis shows that pub closures have been a steady concern in UK print media, albeit with several notable peaks in coverage aligned to key events impacting the sector. Findings suggest that the causes of pub closure are presented as an economic issue, while the consequences of pub closures are typical framed in social and cultural terms. Using Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’, the article analyses a sub-set of this data to examine how the narratives used to explain pub closures make regular and emotive reference to the nation and associated concepts. Pub closures are therefore presented as a threat to the nation and a loss of national identity. These emotive narratives of loss, we argue, work to homogenise both the idealised pub and the wider national community in a manner which occludes the complexity of both.

No abstract is available for this article.