The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 180-181, January 2026.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 173-174, January 2026.

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

The most recent British census was the first to elicit transgender identity. The 2021 Census of England and Wales asked ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’. It is has been argued that this formulation confused a substantial number of respondents who erroneously answered in the negative. The 2022 Census of Scotland asked a clearer question, ‘Do you consider yourself to be trans, or have a trans history?’ Comparison between the results provides further evidence that the Census of England and Wales overestimated the transgender population, and also raises the possibility that it undercounted the non-binary component of this population.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 182-184, January 2026.

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

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.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 177-179, January 2026.

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

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

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.

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.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on 78 interviews and 12 focus groups, this study shows that science-fiction shapes the US public's understandings about economic consequences from AI, informing widespread concerns that sentient machines might fully replace human workers. Though popular beliefs are frequently dismissed as unimportant or merely ignorant, I find that these “science-fictional expectations” about AI's potential to out-compete humans also enable creative departures from the prevailing moral economy of normative judgments about market fairness. By imagining the possibility of AI becoming a rival group-actor in the labor market, participants subverted deeply entrenched, neoliberal cultural associations between moral deservingness and economic performance in two ways. Respondents who anticipated “labor substitution” feared that AI's superior efficiency would render humanity worthless, thereby reinterpreting the moral legitimacy of economic productivity as an existential danger. Others refuted this threat by “enchanting” humanity with enigmatic capabilities said to be unattainable by machines and more valuable than productive capacity. Whereas prior work has focused on deliberate efforts by political actors to influence popular judgments about the economy, these findings show that the public itself can creatively contribute to change in the moral economy through its unexpected, wide-ranging, and even science-fictional interpretations of social conditions like AI automation.

ABSTRACT

With reference to Simmel's work, this article puts forward the notion of ‘stranger views’, which are expressive on the one hand, of the experiences of those who occupy a marginal position in society characterised by experiences of belonging and non-belonging, and on the other, of our own position as researchers, probing spaces of non-belonging and hearing stories that are then rearticulated for an academic audience. In doing so, it provides a reflective dialog between the findings of a research project on migrant homelessness in the UK and the methodological framework brought by New Area Studies. The article deploys the life story research method and focuses on views of the UK from the perspective of migrants from former European colonies who have been in the UK for several years but whose immigration status and lack of economic capital renders them vulnerable to destitution and homelessness. The article offers unique insights into the co-existence of belonging and non-belonging and the dissonance between these feelings. In providing a dialog between accounts deriving from life story interviews with migrants experiencing homelessness and a self-critical reflection about the knowledge produced with such accounts, our article contributes to debates on the sociology of marginality with a three-tiered discussion of migration, homelessness and methodological frameworks, which are rarely considered together.

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, high-income individuals have increasingly sorted into the Democratic Party as a result of their socially liberal views. There is evidence that over time high-income Democrats have also liberalized in their economic attitudes, but the motivations behind this purported support remain unclear. This study uses a forced-choice conjoint experiment with an oversample of high-income respondents and takes the novel approach of pairing the experiment with cognitive interviews in order to explore why high-income Democrats support redistributive policies. Results show that the redistributive preferences of high-income Democrats look very similar to those of other Democrats. They prefer policies proposed by their own party. They want policies that are racially “fair,” and sometimes define this to mean favoring Black recipients. Most of all, however, they are driven by a commitment to “fiscal populism,” the idea that (increased) government spending should be funded by the most elite members of society.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 170-172, January 2026.

ABSTRACT

Congruence between teacher and student perceptions of student academic attitudes reflects positive teacher-student relationships and enables teachers to adjust to students' needs. This study investigates discrepancies between teacher and student perceptions of student's school enjoyment and effort, and whether these discrepancies are associated with student SES. It also tests one mechanism—student visibility—that may be driving the association with student SES. We draw on representative survey data on children at the end of primary school in England and Scotland and use a residual method to compute perceptual discrepancies. We find that teachers significantly rate the effort and enjoyment of low SES students more negatively and the same attitudes for high SES students more positively compared to what the students' own reports would suggest. The association between SES and teacher-student perceptual discrepancies remains significant even when SES-differences in student visibility, captured through student prior ability and behaviour, are considered.

No abstract is available for this article.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 175-176, January 2026.

ABSTRACT

Perspectives on neoliberal political-economic practice often frame its dominance in terms of harms to ‘society’. Prominently, Wendy Brown (2019, 52) offers an account of the ‘neoliberal revolution’, claiming that, when ‘the social vanishes from our ideas, speech, and experience’, commonality disappears, democracy diminishes, and authoritarianism prevails. The paper considers this understanding to argue for the importance of political articulations of ‘society’, which reveal complexities that elude nostalgic accounts of how the social has been lost. Making this case, it works through real-world invocations of social commonality in the name of social cohesion. Social cohesion illustrates the multiplicity of objectives invoking ‘society’, ranging from the production of pro-social subjects to the pursuit of resilience against shifting scenarios of social collapse. On this basis the paper problematises perspectives that either treat the social as an artefact of administrative practice or that prioritize experiences of moral purpose and commonality. It argues that such positions risk mythologizing ‘society’ if they don't attend to the complex circumstances of its political articulation.