ABSTRACT

In this research note, we map the power elite in Greenland, amidst the current geopolitical interest in the nation. Using social network analysis, we identify a power elite of 123 individuals as the central circle in an extensive affiliation network data on 3412 positions held by a total 2052 individuals in 456 affiliations. We find an integrated and cohesive power elite dominated by actors from politics and public and private enterprises. When comparing this central circle to the previous studies of power elites in the former colonial power and current sovereign, Denmark, the political sector and the state are stronger in Greenland at the expense of the private sector. However, while the elite is integrated, we also identify potentials of fracturing. Thus we find a division between politicians—who are more likely to have childhood and educational ties to Greenland—and other elite groups—in particular private business—who are more likely to have academic degrees, be male and live in the Capital, Nuuk. The network of the elite is also clearly clustered around the strength of affiliation with Greenlandic society. We conclude by discussing how the potential fracturing of the Greenlandic elite along ethnic division lines may lead to a lack of cohesion and legitimacy entering the current geopolitical tensions surrounding the world's largest island.

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to sociological scholarship on climate change by examining the development of the voluntary carbon offset market in Finland. While intended to address the collective challenge of climate change, voluntary carbon offsetting has faced criticism for commodifying emissions and shifting responsibility to specific actors. Enabled by voluntary carbon markets, emissions and climate impacts are attributed to companies and individuals, reflecting the idea that each entity possesses its ‘own’ emissions that they can choose to offset. However, this attribution does not happen on its own. The present study thus examines how the collective problem of acting on climate change is coordinated through particular moral engagements. We focus on the socio-legal formatting of the voluntary carbon offset market in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state. We trace the trajectory of Compensate, a key Finnish offset provider whose activities sparked public controversy and led to criminal charges for violating the country's Money Collection Act as well as a legislative reform aimed at formalising voluntary offsets. The controversy centred on the nature of voluntary offsets and whether to consider them to be generally beneficial climate actions or self-interested activities. Based on the theory of the sociology of engagements, our analysis shows how actors engage in moral and political coordination in order to foster and sustain engagements with climate change. More broadly, our case demonstrates that producing and facilitating engagement with climate change through a voluntary market is not merely a matter of implementing effective instruments and arrangements—leading ultimately to the individualisation of climate action—but a result of complex moral and socio-legal formations. We conclude that the formatting of particularised climate engagements is a collectively produced process that necessitates an analysis of the shared moral coordination involved.

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

This paper suggests that catastrophe insurance schemes should be considered within the framework of public goods and commons, and as a form of polycentric organization whose success depends on collective action. The first section situates catastrophe insurance within the “state withdrawal hypothesis:” while neoliberalism is usually understood as promoting a shift from social and solidary insurance programs to private, market-oriented ones, this does not apply to catastrophe insurance. The second section shows that one of the reasons for the persistence of public intervention in catastrophe insurance is its public good dimension: market best practice would indeed promote risk-based premiums leading to unaffordability issues and the disappearance of the good. Such insurance gaps are perceived as a “public bad.” Catastrophe insurance is thus a hybrid public good: it benefits from a large number of users and is threatened by their exclusion. The final section highlights the polycentricity of insurance systems and the challenge this poses to collective action for the sake of prevention.

ABSTRACT

Over the past 20 years, the insurance industry has been experimenting with technological innovations that deeply affect its business model and social function. This article explores the use of digital technologies to monitor policyholders' behaviour and personalise their insurance coverage. Information extracted from behavioural data can be used to produce individualised predictions and design proactive insurance policies, which aim to prompt policyholders to act on the possibility of future damages before they happen. This innovation could bring many benefits in terms of efficiency (improving loss ratio) and foresight (improving risk assessment), but also a renewed focus on individual responsibility for losses. As a consequence, we argue, the collective management of future uncertainty could be undermined, jeopardising the insurance solidarity that makes mutual protection viable.

ABSTRACT

Trust is both a prerequisite and a product of insurance, as insurance contracts are built on and create trust relations that enable a risk-averse perspective towards the future. At the same time, insurer-policyholder relationships are characterised by a persistent distrust, rooted in insurance economics and industry reputation. In this article, we discuss these dynamics through a Luhmannian understanding of (dis)trust as a complexity-reducing functional fiction resulting from social action. Beyond traditional insurance, we examine how trust relations are reconfigured by the introduction of digital technologies and data, developments that could enable new ways to calculate, price and manage risks. We critically assess the claim that these techniques make the future knowable and mitigate—or even eliminate—‘the unreliable human factor’, ultimately replacing trust relations with a principle of transparency. Drawing on sociology of insurance, critical data studies, and our own case-based research on digital insurance products marketed to individuals, we argue that these technologies do not eliminate uncertainties and vulnerabilities as expected in insurance discourse. Instead, they introduce new insecurities and complexities by increasing the trust relations required for insurance arrangements. Consequently, the principle of transparency offers a narrow, techno-solutionist substitute for trust, ignoring the affective aspects of insurer-policyholder relationships and potentially undermining the social contract and solidarity associated with insurance.

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.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

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

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.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Desertion from the military does not turn soldiers into civilians. In this paper, I analyse military identity and embodied practices of soldiers who deserted from the Zimbabwe National Army and were exiled in South Africa. Soldiering is understood as an essence part of who they are, as men who risked their lives and invested in a career, which they later deserted. These soldiers had a particular sense of a military past which functioned at the discursive level: even though they blamed the military for making them leave the barracks, they thought of themselves as soldiers in a context of exile. The men whose narratives are presented in this paper joined the army in post-independence Zimbabwe, and they did not participate in the country's liberation war against the British. These men have a different understanding of themselves as soldiers to those who fought in the liberation war. Their sense of themselves, and others in and outside the military is fundamentally drawn from a professional army. As is often noted, the military is greedy in terms of its demands on its members, and consequently it embeds within military personnel lasting practices, ways of being and a sense of a military identity, all of which can be resistant to change, yet simultaneously resilient, even in a context of exile. I therefore suggest that the experience of civilian life alone does little to erode the practices and mind frames of the military ingrained into army deserters even outside the army. This seems to be the case in a number of African societies where military desertion is prevalent, especially in authoritarian regimes.

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

Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on ‘earning while learning’ (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experiences have received limited attention and constitute something of a ‘black box’. We open that box by examining the paid work undertaken by full-time students. Through analysis of a national data set, we examine patterns with respect to employment rates, pay, hours, and occupations, as well as how these are gendered. We find a small ‘studentness’ penalty—lower pay for students than non-student workers of the same age. We also find small increases in the proportion currently engaged in paid work. Gender is identified as a key variable in shaping student employment rates, with women considerably more likely than men to work while studying. We find no evidence of a gender pay gap in EwL, but this is largely because most student workers are concentrated in two ‘integrated’ occupations, which we designate as ‘equally bad’ - poorly paid but gender equitable. Older students are more likely to work in gender-segregated occupations, with some indications of male and female gender pay advantages for gender-dominant employment, suggesting a possible early incentive for occupational gender segregation. Given the gender disparity in student work, a core finding is that women disproportionately undertake this poor-quality work. We argue that to address the under-theorisation of EwL, student employment—including its gendering—requires greater attention and should be integrated into conceptualisations of a ‘working-life-course’.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper conceives the adoption and development of artificial intelligence by businesses as a strategy within the economic field. Using a survey of over 2000 businesses in the UK and tools of geometric data analysis, I construct a model of the British economic field and project into it indicators of past, present and intended AI adoption. This provides a sense of the correspondences between the structure of the field, the temporal order of strategies, and perceptions of the possible and necessary among its agents. Dominant players within the field have clearly led and will lead the AI ‘revolution’, rendering AI a tool for perpetuating intra-field domination and reproduction, but others below them seem set to pursue emulation strategies to keep up. These conservation strategies may also contain, however, an internal difference between innovation and dependence corresponding with the new and the old within the field.

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

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.