Abstract

This study contributes new insights into whether volunteering improves the employment prospects of jobless individuals by examining its relationship with the speed at which they secure new jobs— an outcome that has received limited attention in previous research. Our comprehensive data enables us to investigate this by constructing an event history dataset that merges information from the Danish Volunteer Survey with administrative register data. Our results show that when we adjust for variations in education and labor market experience, jobless individuals who volunteer remain unemployed approximately two weeks or 31 percent longer than those who do not. Although our results remain correlational, they challenge the wisdom of promoting volunteering as a reemployment strategy, which some governments in European countries already do while others consider doing so. We recommend that policymakers reconsider the promotion of volunteering as a reemployment tool and call for further research into the relationship between volunteering and unemployment duration, particularly in different national contexts.

Abstract

Michel Foucault's concept of the dispositif is increasingly salient in sociological scholarship. We identify and criticise an ‘anonymous’ emphasis in this scholarship, which often presents the dispositif as an anonymous network that acts without human agents. To remedy this tendency we develop an agent-inclusive version of the dispositif for sociological research. Turning to Foucault's work from the 1970s, we recover descriptions of how social groups act as instigators of dispositifs through their invention of tactics and techniques. We develop these into an agent-inclusive version of dispositional analytics and suggest five steps to pursue in empirical analysis. We exemplify these steps through a historical case of protesting. Finally, we show how our revisionist version of the dispositif meets critiques of Foucault's agentless approach and discuss the implication for a further integration of sociological research with dispositional analytics.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

Abstract

In this article we consider the theoretical and methodological implications of Deleuzian fabulation for research on recovery from drugs and alcohol as an alternative way of making and doing methods in sociology. The article draws on data produced as part of an ongoing interdisciplinary research collaboration, begun in 2019, with the visual artist and filmmaker Melanie Manchot, social scientists Nicole Vitellone and Lena Theodoropoulou, and people in recovery from drugs and alcohol engaged in the production of Manchot’s first feature film STEPHEN. This project attends to the methodological practice of filmmaking as a way of thinking with and alongside colleagues from divergent disciplines about the role of methods, concepts and practices for confronting and resisting processes of stigmatisation. Investigating the research participants’ engagement with Manchot’s filmmaking practices in STEPHEN as a way to tell stories otherwise, our goal is to engage the social life of creative methods and in doing so, propose an alternative narrative of recovery. In this investigation, we use the term fabulation as developed by Deleuze. In Cinema II, Deleuze makes a distinction between the cinema of reality, where storytelling derives from the camera’s objective gaze and a given character’s subjective actions, and cinema verité where the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred. In cinema verité, the camera is not an objective observer but an active producer that keeps reminding the viewer that the on-screen characters are neither fully real, nor fictional. Attending to Deleuze’s description of fabulation as it emerges through this process of challenging the existence of ‘real’ identities in cinema, and beyond, we investigate the use of cinematic devices and fabulative processes of filmmaking in the production of STEPHEN. In doing so, the article develops a methodological account of the activity of fabulation as a material and embodied practice that resists processes of stigmatisation. Through this interdisciplinary project, we propose a new arts-based research agenda which points to the ways in which fabulation as a minor mode of recovery concerns an engagement with the creation of a people to come.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

Abstract

Scholars have suggested that the heightened focus on diversity in Western cultural fields may drive forms of racial commodification, impacting cultural representations of ‘race’. However, few studies apply Bourdieu's theory of cultural production to understand how racial commodification may also disrupt field dynamics. This article aims to explore how racialised minority cultural producers in Norway experience the intensified focus on diversity within the cultural field. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of cultural production, critical diversity studies and the cultural industries approach, I analyse fieldwork and interviews with 41 Norwegian cultural producers. This analysis reveals three key diversity-related changes participants experienced: (1) a transformation of racial identities into commodities, (2) a shift towards racial self-commodification, and (3) a change in the value of ‘diverse stories’. The findings suggest that the increased focus on diversity encourages a form of racial commodification, with a dual impact on racialised minorities' artistic freedom. While it restricts their potential for aesthetic recognition, it also creates a platform to redefine what counts as legitimate culture. This offers insights into an under-researched aspect of diversity efforts and racial commodification, revealing how this commodification can instigate change within the cultural field.

Abstract

This paper seeks to enhance memory studies' conceptual toolkit by reconsidering established perspectives on “memory politics.” The paper theorizes various modes of temporal connectivity cultivated through politicized references to a shared past. Our empirical case is focused on a collection of roughly 5.000 recent articles about the war in Ukraine from major Russian state-aligned news outlets. We analyze and typologize the narrative and rhetorical gestures by which these articles make the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” and the post-Soviet “special military operation” speak to one another, both prior to and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates that even in contemporary Russia's tightly controlled, propagandistic mass media ecology, politicized uses of memory foster diverse temporal structures within the propaganda narratives. We present a typology of these relations, mapping the distinct modes and intensities of connections between past and present. At one end of the spectrum, we identify a mode of temporal organization that presents past events and figures as fully detached from the present, available solely for historiographic reflection. At the other end, we find narratives that entirely collapse historical distance, addressing contemporary audiences as participants in a timeless war drama, with stakes that transcend any specific historical period. We propose that the presented typology may be applicable beyond our specific case. As a tool for analyzing the hitherto understudied organization of time in politicized articulations of memory, it could be employed in various cultural and political contexts. Furthermore, our approach can serve as a foundation for future research into the actual persuasive and affective impact that specific temporal modalities may have on their target audiences.

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

This paper contributes new understandings of the dynamics and processes of gentrification that contribute to wider transformations of class relations. We argue that the hospitality sector, specifically the tastes, dispositions and practices of young hospitality workers, are central in how gentrification processes currently function. We extend concepts of elective and selective belonging, and reflexive complicity, to analyse how young hospitality workers understand their own labouring practices as contributing to gentrification in their local areas. We show how their aesthetic and ethical orientations to place, especially their workplaces, make their experience of hospitality work more palatable. At the same time, their tastes are ‘put to work’ in venues that contribute to the vibes and aesthetics aimed at middle class consumption practices, while creating symbolic boundaries for long-term residents who are being ostracised in the process. In this way, the high cultural capital bar workers possess thus become spatial bouncers for high economic capital property developers, where reflexive complicity is instrumentalised as a process of symbolic violence. We propose that hospitality labour, and the everyday relationalities and working practices of young workers, are crucial for understanding the contemporary processes of gentrification and class formation.

Abstract

This research note highlights emerging findings that speak to the challenges of joining the transnational elite, particularly for those coming from the Global South. For a longitudinal study of wealth inheritors becoming more transnational via their educational paths, we spoke with 16 young people who were all in their early 20s and primarily from economic elite families in the Global South. Some participants had clear ambitions, while others were less sure about their future, wondering where they should move and what they should do when they got there. Their various narratives reveal that underlying the possibilities and problems of where to locate themselves was our participants' access to different constellations of economic, social and cultural capital, as well as their race, citizenship and ‘home’ country's geopolitical situation. Their parents' ambitions that they become part of a global elite remained in most cases largely unfulfilled—despite a significant economic investment in their secondary and university educations. Only a small minority of our participants aspired to and/or were able to secure such transnational futures.

Abstract

Conceptualising precarity has come to rest on the multi-dimensional and differentiated insecurities of job and worker, this however belies the relationship between structure and experience where precarity originates. To bridge that relationship, I employ the landscape concept to position workers relative to the structural contingency of precarious work. To study this landscape, I conducted an ethnography involving job searching, working, and interviewing workers. While certainly insecure, these jobs displayed parallel characteristics of streamlined hiring and short-notice starts which workers took advantage of. I explore three ideal-typical ‘jobs’—the first, only, and best job—to examine how vulnerability is balanced with contingency to produce precarity. This analysis and the landscape approach locate the political-economic transformation of work in the context of workers' lives and their labour market position. Taking precarious work is an act of balancing one's vulnerabilities in a way that constructs and thus naturalises precarity. Overall, the article contributes an image of an economy where workers have to be opportunistic in a continual struggle for work while stratified by their personal circumstances and position in this labour market.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 75, Issue 5, Page 954-955, December 2024.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 75, Issue 5, Page 961-962, December 2024.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 75, Issue 5, Page 956-958, December 2024.

Abstract

In this study, we shed light on the social consequences the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had in other European countries. We argue that positive perceptions of one's intergenerational mobility are linked with political and economic stability and that the war can thus be expected to impact intergenerational mobility perceptions. We test our pre-registered hypothesis with representative survey data from three European countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden, which were significantly affected by the ongoing war. Our results show that individuals' war-related concerns in all countries are divided into proximal and distal concerns. In turn, proximal concerns go along with greater perceived downward and less perceived upward mobility in the United Kingdom and Germany. We interpret these findings by calling for expanding the horizons of intergenerational mobility research by incorporating areas of life other than socio-economic position.

Abstract

Despite a large literature consistently showing a relationship between higher levels of education and lower levels of ethnic prejudice, some points of contention remain. First, it remains unclear whether education has a causal effect on attitudes, mainly due to a lack of longitudinal studies. Second, due to the majority of studies on prejudice being conducted in Europe and North America, we do not know to what extent the inverse relationship between education and prejudice is generalizable beyond the “global North.” To answer these questions, I study attitudes toward immigrants in Chile in the years 2016–2022, using six waves of the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey. Chile provides new variations in economic and cultural factors, with its stable albeit highly unequal economy, and increased immigration from culturally similar countries which shed light on possible scope conditions of the so-called liberalizing effect of education. I analyze whether attaining more education has an effect on reducing levels of perceived economic and cultural threat. The findings show that increases in education are associated with both lower levels of perceived economic and cultural threat, with education having a stronger effect on the latter.

Abstract

The global rise of right-wing populist [RWP] parties presents a major political concern. RWP parties' voters tend to be citizens who have either experienced or fear economic deprivation. Income change constitutes a viable measure of this deprivation. However, previous contributions examining effects of income change on support for RWP parties have yielded diverging conclusions. This paper challenges previous findings by incorporating considerations of gender and within-household inequality. We hypothesise a negative relationship between, on the one hand, personal and household income change and, on the other hand, sympathy towards RWP parties. Furthermore, we expect to find a stronger association between personal income change and RWP sympathy among men. Moreover, we expect the relationship between household income change and RWP sympathy to differ between genders. Finally, we hypothesise that this gender disparity can be interpreted by considering who contributes most to the household income. All these hypotheses are grounded in gender socialisation and economic dominance theories. Analysing Dutch LISS longitudinal data spanning from 2007 to 2021 (N = 7,801, n = 43,954) through fixed-effects multilevel linear regression models enables us to address various competing explanations. It appears that only for men, personal income change is negatively linked with sympathies towards RWP parties. However, considering who is the highest earner within households reveals that women are also affected by their personal income change if they earn the highest income. For both men and women, household income change is negatively linked with sympathies towards RWP parties. These results lend partial support to both the socialisation and economic dominance theories. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Abstract

What are the historical conditions under which a sociologically informed understanding of health inequality can emerge in the public sphere? We seek to address this question through the lens of a strategically chosen historical puzzle—the stubborn persistence of and salient variation in high infant mortality rates across British industrial towns at the dawn of the previous century—as analysed by Arthur Newsholme, the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. In doing so, we retrace the historical processes through which the evolving public health movement gradually helped crystallise a scientific understanding of the social causes of excess mortality. We map the dominant ideology of the public sphere at the time, chart the shifting roles of the state, and retrace the historical origins and emergence of ‘public health’ as a distinctive category of state policy and public discourse. We situate the public health movement in this historical configuration and identify the cracks in the existing ideological and administrative edifice through which this movement was able to articulate a novel approach to population health—one that spotlights the political economy of social inequality. We relate this historical sequence to the rise of industrial capitalism, the social fractures that it spawned, and the organised counter-movements that it necessitated.