ABSTRACT

In the last decade, the “decolonial turn” has gained prominence across academic disciplines, challenging inherent Eurocentric knowledge paradigms. Extending these conversations, this paper critically investigates the notion of “the global” from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial scholars criticize the mainstream conceptualization of cosmopolitanism for its Eurocentrism and advocate for alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. This paper builds on this decolonial scholarship and examines how various local actors make sense of and give meaning to the contested category of “the global” in understanding, articulating, and addressing their visions for social change. Drawing from ethnographic research on queer activism in South Korea, it identifies the coexistence and contestation between two forms of cosmopolitanism—metrocentric and provincial—and suggests that we understand non-Western activists as producers of anticolonial thought from below. By doing so, this paper contributes to critical scholarship on globalization, cosmopolitanism, and decolonial thought.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT

The research published in François Ewald's magisterial L’État providence (1986) has been a major source of inspiration for sociological work on insurance for nearly 40 decades. This is impressive given that only a tiny part of that research was known in the Anglophone world until recently, through a few separately translated articles. In this paper, I study how Ewald paints a bigger picture of the insurantial society in the book. First, I examine how L’État providence weaves together histories of responsibility, risk, solidarity and insurance that together made possible the emergence of the French welfare state at the dawn of the twentieth century; simultaneously, the book describes how the concept of the ‘social’ could become an effective element in the practices of law and government. Second, I enquire into how Ewald combines a philosophical interest with empirical work on the insurantial society. I look at four aspects of Ewald's approach: its site specificity, its reliance on empirical description, the way it does conceptual work and its manner of addressing ontological questions. The point is to explicate the theoretical sensibility that is immanent in Ewald's own scholarly ascesis and that has enabled him to paint the bigger picture provided by L’État providence.

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

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

The strategies, decisions and beliefs of those who occupy prominent positions of economic power have influence on very large corporations and the markets they dominate, on vast amounts of economic resources, and on the rules of the game. However, the sociology of elites faces a dual challenge: divergent conceptualisations of what can be considered as a position of economic power and internationally incompatible sources of information hinder comparative analysis. The World Elite Database (WED) addresses this dual challenge, by generating, based on a consistent definition, standardised data for 16 countries. This research note introduces WED, its construction principles, and presents preliminary findings on how economic elites differ across countries.

ABSTRACT

The association between contextual poverty and educational achievement is not well-researched in lower-income countries. This paper investigates this link and examines how it varies between urban and rural school locations in Bangladesh, acknowledging the dual urban-rural dynamics of the country. Analyses based on original school-level longitudinal data, encompassing over 90 per cent of secondary schools in Bangladesh, demonstrate that subdistrict-level educational poverty (measured as the proportion of adults with education below the primary level) has a stronger and significantly negative association with achievement at the secondary level compared to economic poverty (measured as the percentage of people under the national poverty line). This negative association is starker for the ‘science’ academic stream, which necessitates supplementary private tutoring. I argue that in poorer local areas, pupils are less likely to encounter successful role models in science fields, experience a shortage of qualified instructors, and face difficulties in securing additional resources for science subjects due to poverty. Furthermore, urban areas generally exhibit higher achievement levels, reflecting a greater proportion of educated individuals and role models. However, urban achievement experiences a sharper decline with increasing educational poverty, likely due to structural inequalities such as informal settlements and unequal access to quality schools. In contrast, rural areas show less sensitivity to educational poverty, possibly due to the ‘scarcity effect’ of role models, where the limited presence of role models exerts a disproportionately positive influence on aspirations, even in high-poverty contexts.

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.

ABSTRACT

This article explores gender and social justice in post-conflict societies, using Northern Ireland as a case study. It focuses specifically on the socio-economic impact of the UK's withdrawal from the EU (Brexit) on women in Northern Ireland using a social justice framework, drawing on recognition, redistribution and representation as conceptualised by Nancy Fraser. It uses qualitative research conducted between 2022 and 2023 comprising focus groups, an expert seminar and semi-structured interviews sensitive to an intersectional understanding of women. While centred on Brexit, the findings have broader implications for understanding how post-conflict governance, sovereignty, and international obligations intersect with gendered inequalities. We argue that Brexit demonstrates a profound neglect of Northern Ireland's unique position, politically and geographically, particularly the UK's obligations under the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, and underscores the marginalisation and exclusion of women's voices in post-conflict governance. We find that the impact of Brexit on women in Northern Ireland is distinct and disproportionate from other parts of the UK for several reasons, including that it is a post-conflict society; there exists specific patterns of violence against women; and there is a prior reliance by the third sector on EU funding. The article thus contributes to a deeper understanding of the systemic barriers that inhibit participatory equality and outlines pathways for achieving social justice in Northern Ireland.

ABSTRACT

A growing population in economically developed societies are simultaneously providing childcare and older adult care, or sandwich care. The existing studies reveal that sandwich carers are more physically, mentally and financially challenged than those providing dyadic care. This article explores an understudied area of sandwich care and ambivalence. Ambivalence encompasses the difficulties, challenges, and range of feelings, including guilt, anger, isolation, sense of duty, fulfilment and many others that sandwich carers' experience. Building on the existing sociological approach to ambivalence, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for delineating the entangled structural and relational webs where sandwich carers' experiences and negotiations are situated. Our theoretical framework captures the temporal, socially structured and policy-contextual properties of ambivalence. We argue that ambivalence arises from historical and prospective family relationships (temporal) that intersect with the gendered expectations for parenting and family responsibility of adult social care (socially structured), which further intersects with care policy and available care services (policy contextual). The three qualities of ambivalence influence each other in multiple ways. Socially structured and temporal qualities of ambivalence can influence sandwich carers' access to and experience of using care services, but the social arrangement of care can also increase or mitigate ambivalence in sandwich care arising from them. While we illustrate this by drawing on considerable evidence from Japan, we argue that our study provides a useful theoretical framework attuned to understanding the experience of such carers in diverse social and cultural contexts.

ABSTRACT

Insurance serves as a social good, providing financial protection against disasters whilst operating within a profit-driven market. This dual role highlights the complex intersection of social and commercial interests, raising a fairness puzzle often portrayed as a trade-off between solidarity and actuarial fairness. Insurance organisations adhere to actuarial fairness by setting insurance premiums proportional to each individual's risk. As extreme weather drives greater losses in high-risk areas, actuarial fairness often results in unaffordable premiums for many. To address this, societies may adopt principles of solidarity fairness to subsidise their premiums. However, this approach threats diminishing personal responsibility to contain risk, as individuals may rely on subsidised protection rather than taking proactive measures. This study draws on a longitudinal qualitative study of a government-legislated insurance organisation to develop a process framework that reconceptualises fairness in insurance as a duality of solidarity and actuarial fairness. It offers insights into designing insurance systems that are socially equitable and financially sustainable.

ABSTRACT

In his classic work L'ancien régime et la révolution, Alexis de Tocqueville proposes a reinterpretation of the French Revolution: behind the spectacular ruptures associated with the event, profound continuities are at play. Beyond the specific case of the French Revolution, Tocqueville calls for vigilance in mobilizing the notion of revolution to account for historical dynamics. In this contribution, I propose to apply this vigilance to account for the supposed “Big Data revolution” in the field of European insurance. Most observers of the sector—whether professionals or academic—agree that the arrival of Big Data represents a major rupture. This break would call into question the business model of insurance companies, stabilized for 250 years around the principle of risk pooling, since it would now be possible to individualize risk management. This individualization of risk management would then reconfigure the nature of solidarity and the social bond at work within Western societies, which, since the end of the 19th century, have been constituted as “insurance societies” (Ewald 1986). On the contrary, I defend the idea that these ruptures are only apparent, incomplete or unfinished, and that the “Big Data Revolution” masks profound continuities, by mobilizing two arguments: attempts to individualize risk management long predate the advent of big data; and attempts to individualize risk management based on big data are, to date, inconclusive.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 2, Page 460-461, March 2025.

Abstract

Changes in the social mobility of men in Scotland between the late-19th and the late-twentieth century are examined using new individual-level data from nineteenth-century censuses, linking records of men aged 0–19 in 1871 to their records in 1901, and then comparing their patterns with the social mobility of men aged 30–49 in 1974 and in 2001 as recorded in social surveys at these dates. The extent of social mobility in the nineteenth century was large. In particular, the social origins of people in the highest classes—the salariat—were very varied, indicating a society that was more open than is sometimes supposed. There was a slow growth in social mobility between then and 2001. In both periods, class inheritance—sons in the same social class as their father—was strongest in the economically declining sectors, which were agriculture and fisheries in 1901 and industry in 1974 and 2001. In the 1901 data, however, the transition to a non-agricultural economy induced strong outward mobility from agriculture.

Abstract

The conventional understanding of resilience often portrays it as a positive outcome emerging from adverse situations. This perspective frequently shapes interventions aimed at bolstering resilience among individuals considered to be in need. Drawing upon data from a European study, this paper contends that young people's apparent ‘latent rejection’ of favourable opportunities, or their deliberate choice to remain in precarious situations despite having some agency, should be recontextualised as unconventional but valid expressions of resilience. Instead of framing resilience solely as an aspirational concept, we propose a reframing that emphasises its role in coping with and surviving challenging circumstances. Furthermore, we advocate for the adoption of Mason's ‘safe-uncertainty’ model to foster a more practical form of resilience. This approach towards a more sustainable resilience could be valuable in other fields dealing with those populations labelled as ‘vulnerable’, ‘problematic’ or ‘disadvantaged’, and it can, we argue, enhance decision-making skills, and promote the development of robust support networks.

Abstract

Treasuring the legacy of Ida B Wells-Barnett as a Black feminist is a vital liberatory commitment, as previous scholarship has commendably demonstrated. Equally important, however, is the need to present Wells-Barnett as an anticolonial theorist whose scholarly texts—Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Crusade for Justice—should be incorporated into social theory curricula. This article examines Wells-Barnett's acute apprehension of the foundational structures of the US empire-state in her scholarly writings on lynching. As she analysed, the white mob violence epitomised the co-re-formation of race and gender, rule of difference, and subversion of offender-judge relationship. The agency of non-state actors (e.g., lynch mobs) and government agents (e.g., judge and politicians) co-constituted the reformation—not total transformation—of these foundational structures. Lynching, therefore, was the lynchpin of the US empire-state in the post-Reconstruction period: it sustained the white supremacist order by imposing a mass death penalty on Black people, while simultaneously serving as a disgrace to US civilization. To conclude, we highlight how Wells-Barnett's theory offers broader relevance to anticolonial/postcolonial sociology, particularly through her subaltern standpoint, attention to the role of non-state actors, and her commitment to intersectional analysis.

Abstract

In this paper, we complement a previous study of the UK natural science elite, as represented by Fellows of the Royal Society, with a comparable study of the humanities and social sciences elites, as represented by Fellows of the British Academy. We seek to establish how far similarities and differences exist in the social composition of these three academic elites and in the routes that their members have followed into elite positions. We are also concerned with the consequences of the humanities and social sciences elites being brought together in the British Academy, in contrast with the situation in most other countries where elite natural and social scientists are located in the same academy. We pursue these issues in the context of C. P. Snow's discussion of the social underlay of the cultural disjunction that he saw between the natural sciences and the humanities, while also considering how the social sciences fit in. We find that there is support for Snow's position at the time of his writing. However, a notable development in more recent years is that the growing social sciences elite is moving in its social composition away from the humanities elite and closer to the natural science elite. This is primarily due to changes in the social origins and education of Fellows in those sections of the British Academy that are on the borderline between the social and the natural sciences. A widening difference thus arises with Fellows in the humanities sections most representative of Snow's ‘traditional culture’.