ABSTRACT

This article rethinks meritocratic ideology as practical knowledge that transforms through biographies of social and geographical mobility. Drawing on 37 interviews with Black and Muslim Italians living in Britain or returned to Italy, the article shows that meritocracy is rarely invoked as a coherent ideology but works as practical, embodied commonsense about the world order, with Britain leading a hierarchy of European societies. The article explores three dimensions of meritocratic commonsense and racialised minorities' double-consciousness (Du Bois). First, 'meritocratic Britain' is not simply a neoliberal narrative, but draws from postcolonial, intergenerational histories of family migration that include desires for equality and security. Second, participants' encounters with British racism do not necessarily challenge beliefs in meritocratic Britain, as being racialised as 'foreigners' in Italy leaves deeper scars on their sense of identity, belonging and recognition. Third, meritocratic Britain can lose emotional resonance when participants feel desires for connectedness and home that are not satisfied by occupational and educational mobility. By centring racialised minorities' double-consciousness, practical knowledge and struggles for recognition, the article highlights the limitations of false consciousness, misinformation and psychological compensation as explanations for meritocratic belief. Moreover, it unravels how meritocratic narratives transform across life stages.

ABSTRACT

This paper argues for a re-enchantment of studies of contemporary climate change activism. It focuses upon Christian climate activists in the UK and how they are reinterpreting their theological beliefs in ways that mobilise religious communities. We employ a social movement framing perspective to discover the nature of this ‘interpretative work’ using data from a survey (n = 319) and in-depth interviews (n = 62) with Anglicans and Catholics in three church dioceses, a Christian aid agency, and two Christian social movement groups. We found that familiar ‘stewardship’ framings of Christian climate activism dominated in institutional contexts but gave way to ‘prophetic’ framings in Christian social movements. Prophetic framings of climate activism have received very little attention compared with stewardship, but they provide strong theological justification and a distinct emotional inflection to Christian participation in climate protest, and form a bridge to groups like Extinction Rebellion. Prophetic framings were, however, open to prognostic disputes, and remained within an anthropocentric discourse on climate change. With Christians comprising about one third of the world's population, it is of global significance to the environmental movement that in certain enclaves and across denominations, Christian beliefs are being reinterpreted in ways that can lead to their mobilisation not just as ‘climate stewards’ caring for creation, but as ‘climate prophets’ engaged in political protest.

ABSTRACT

In Australia, ideals of fairness, merit, and inclusion are said to be reflected in national identity through the concept of the fair go. While the fair go embodies the right to fair opportunities for success, regardless of personal background, its application to migrants remains a politically and socially contested issue. In existing international scholarship, the exclusion of migrants is often associated with ethnic and economic nationalist beliefs or the anti-elite sentiments of right-wing populists. However, there is little extant research on the way these beliefs sit alongside egalitarian and meritocratic discourses of fairness in a society. This paper explores whether commitment to the fair go influences public opinion on migration more strongly than established sets of beliefs. Drawing on a new module of fairness beliefs within the nationally representative Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), we explore whether individuals who endorse the principle of equal opportunity are also more likely to hold positive attitudes towards migration. We find that diverse beliefs about the fair go cluster around egalitarian, meritocratic and redistributive ideas of fairness. Our findings have implications for fairness-based arguments in favour of migrant inclusion in Australia and around the world.

ABSTRACT

The article is concerned with an issue which is not comprehensively covered in the broad ‘living with difference’ literature on encounters in public places: What makes the city's diverse strangers actually interact face-to-face? Drawing on long-term urban ethnography in Oslo, Norway, the article explores ‘contact-supporting circumstances’ in urban public space: basic circumstances that authorise or encourage convivial chance interactions among diverse strangers. The research reveals that a wide range of circumstances support such interaction, principally ‘exposed and openings positions’ and ‘mutual openness’. In categorising and empirically substantiating these circumstances, which mostly have been investigated as individual material or social factors, the study adds to existing work in the fields of everyday multiculturalism, conviviality and their like. It does so by expanding upon a lesser-known part of Goffman's pioneering interactionist work, demonstrating how Goffmanian microsocial concepts can help portray diversity or multiculturalism as an interactional reality and thus open up original perspectives to ‘larger’ societal issues.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Sociologists of knowledge production have long explored how scholars tackle empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges. This article highlights a parallel process: the accumulation of moral justifications for pursuing knowledge in specific fields, which we term normative cumulation. As researchers face normative objections and dilemmas, they develop new moral justifications for their work. Researchers' interpretive work leads some justifications to institutionalize and accumulate over time. These justifications may continue to coexist within the same scholarly community. We examine 20^th-century American family demography as a case study, tracing historically how scholars justified their nascent scholarship through moral arguments linked to perceived social goods that demography produces. Over the history of family demography's development, diverse moral frameworks emerged, coexisting to justify family demographers' work. The article analyzes how shifting moral justifications in twentieth-century American family demography diversified the field's approach, influencing its research agendas and potential societal roles.

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose and define the concept of medical domination by combining insights from political sociology, Bourdieu's theory of domination, and intersectional perspectives. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study of abortion services in France, I analyse how a set of legitimised and institutionalised power practices shape access to care despite growing emphasis on patient autonomy. This conceptualisation helps explain disparities in healthcare access and quality, showing how medical interactions reproduce social hierarchies beyond the clinical setting. The paper contributes to political sociology of health by examining both structural foundations of medical power and the socialisation processes through which professionals learn to exercise authority and patients learn to submit to it.

ABSTRACT

Starting with Du Bois, scholars of race have investigated the role of White ignorance as it perpetuates White supremacy. Today, Charles Mills and scholars continue this inquiry by expanding the importance of White ignorance to include multiple forms. This article contributes to this inquiry by highlighting the role and types of White innocence. We argue that White innocence functions in two ways that generate and justify White innocence, narrative and consumptive innocence. We use St. Augustine, Florida, and Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to outline the contours of narrative and consumptive innocence. Through the paper, we find that global White supremacy is operating in similar, yet local ways based on place-based histories that produce the two types of innocence. We conclude by connecting this research to the larger Du Boisian sociology as a liberatory practice.

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to assess how different forms of state power shape public health outcomes during a global crisis. Drawing on Michael Mann's distinction between infrastructural and despotic power, we construct a typology of states and evaluate its predictive power for COVID-19 vaccination rates in 161 countries across three pandemic periods (2021, 2022, 2023). Our analysis shows that infrastructural power—a state's capacity to coordinate society and implement policy—was associated with higher vaccination rates, regardless of its level of despotic power. However, the relevance of different state capacities varied across periods: economic resources were critical for securing doses during early scarcity, infrastructural capacity was key for distribution once vaccines became widely available, and low-despotic states proved more successful at “vaccinating the margins” during the final phase. These findings demonstrate that Mann's interactive conception of state power offers a sharper analytical lens than standard proxies like GDP or health security indices, and they reaffirm the role of infrastructural power in effective governance amid transnational crises.

ABSTRACT

In the current context of extreme economic inequality and rising concentrations of income and wealth at the top, the social processes through which elites restrict the wider population's access to resources and opportunities, and the role of exclusive organisations in maintaining cohesion among a select few, have important implications for social inequalities. Drawing on 41 semi-structured interviews with wealthy members of the business class living in and around Manchester in northern England (21 of whom were members of a CEO peer group), I analyse how three social processes—homophily, structured reciprocity and therapeutic cultural resources –make and legitimate cohesion between members, as well as instances of when cohesion fails. In doing so, I explore how therapy culture has travelled upwards, to the executive and owning class, through CEO peer groups. I make the case that CEO peer groups represent a fruitful entry point into wider debates about class formation for the contemporary business class in the UK and, given their global scope, more broadly.

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the causal effect of motherhood on women's occupational class trajectories—the Motherhood Class Penalty—using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We apply sequence optimal matching alongside other matching techniques to construct counterfactual class trajectories for mothers in the UK. Our results show that motherhood significantly increases downward mobility and limits access to professional occupations. Low professional women face an estimated 15% penalty, while high professional women experience a 5% penalty compared to their childless counterparts. We find that professional-class women are more likely to remain attached to the labour market after childbirth, whereas working-class mothers are at greater risk of permanently exiting the workforce. Among all groups, low professional women experience the most significant forgone upward mobility, highlighting how motherhood penalties vary across the class spectrum. These findings stress the substantial human capital loss associated with motherhood in the UK and suggest that occupational penalties are shaped by existing socio-economic hierarchies, potentially reinforcing broader patterns of inequality.

ABSTRACT

Scholars of aging and nationalism rarely engage with each another. To remedy this gap, I examine how ethnonationalism becomes a resource for navigating the precarity of aging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two private senior residences in a region of Québec, I show how financially privileged Québécois seniors enact nationhood through everyday cultural practices. I introduce the concept of “aging in nationhood” to describe how seniors draw on ethnonationalist identities to foster comfort, community, and meaning at an age of decline—often with exclusionary effects. Seniors who do not—or cannot—assimilate into majority culture experience social isolation. By linking nationalism and aging, I show how seniors reproduce the nation, shaping their well-being and the boundaries of belonging. While grounded in Québec, this concept offers new insight for thinking about how dominant-group seniors mobilize ethnonationalism as a source of membership and exclusion in white aging societies across the Atlantic.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Scholars of the welfare state have long argued that, in liberal democracies, welfare state expansion depends on successful coalitions in its favour. Under what circumstances do these coalitions form? Party systems, economic interest, and political mobilisation have all been thought to influence the emergence of coalitions for welfare state expansion. In this article, I argue that law plays a critical role in facilitating the last of these factors. Drawing on a growing body of literature that sees law as constitutive of, rather than merely reflective of, social relations, I demonstrate that available legal forms meaningfully inform opportunities for welfare coalitions. In particular, I examine how debates over what a trade union is—a voluntary association of individuals, or a corporate body deserving of a state statute—shaped coalitions for welfare reform in the US and the UK at the turn of the twentieth century.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Tracing the early adoption of computer gang databases by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s to the deployment of computationally-assisted surveillance during the Vietnam War, this paper uses a genealogical approach to compare surveillance technologies developed across the arc of colonial racial capitalism—from the Age of Imperialism through the Cold War and into the historical present. Specifically analyzing technologies displayed at the 1902-03 Hanoi Exposition in French Indochina and the 1964-65 New York World's Fair during the Cold War, it positions Southeast Asia as an important case because much of the primary architecture for the development of the modern American surveillance state historically arose from attempts to manage anti-imperial resistance across the decolonizing Pacific. The analysis connects how early anthropometric measurement and recordkeeping practices under French colonial rule transformed through the widespread adoption of computational tools for postwar technocratic planning during the American War in Vietnam, demonstrating a rationalization of surveillance over time as economies of accumulation and disposal interacted with technological innovations in bureaucratic management to maximize means-end, state-market efficiencies. Ultimately the analysis offers the concept of the coloniality of data, showing how global interpellations of the locatable criminal body in local, national, and international databases continue to constitute data itself as a rationalized—and increasingly automated—technology of imperial power.