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Sociology was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. This essay excavates a tradition of social thought that grew alongside metropolitan sociology but has been marginalized by it: anticolonial thought. Emerging from anticolonial movements, writers and thinkers, anticolonial thought in 19th and 20th centuries emerged from a variety of thinkers (from indigenous activists in the Americas to educated elites in the American, Francophone and British colonies). I argue that this body of thought offers distinct visions of society, social relations, and social structure, along with generative analytic approaches to the social self, social solidarity and global relations-among other themes. Anticolonial thought offers the basis for an alternative canon and corpus of sociological thinking to which we might turn as we seek to revitalize and decolonize sociology., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Julian Go's 'Thinking Against Empire' identifies the corpus of 'anticolonial thought' as being instructive for a wider rethinking of how sociology might rally its key conceptualisations of social relations. He insightfully identifies the marginalisation of such thinking from Sociology as an institutionalised discipline. In our response we take up some of the warnings Go provides in the closing sections of his essay-which concern the expanse of intellectual engagement being currently bracketed under or connected to the 'anti-colonial', not least vis-à-vis the 'decolonising/decolonial' turn-to further unpack how the 'anti-colonial' might be adapted for thinking through contemporary socio-political dynamics. Offering, first, a precis of some particularities of British Sociology vis-a-vis the contributions of anticolonial social theory, this article then expands upon the dilemmas arising when anticolonial theory contemporaneous to the pre-decolonisation era is transposed to contingencies of the present 21 st century. Namely, whilst the anticolonial archive has proved invaluable to upending the omissions but also complicities of European social theory canons, allowing for a much more expansive sense of how the modern world and its violences were conjured and how we might accordingly escape its miseries, it is also clear that much of the postcolonial world has undergone sufficient shifts to warrant an adapted sense of how we consider the anti-colonial for our current politics. We suggest that the important deviations which anti-colonial theorisations might heed include the dangers of conflating the anticolonial with an affirmation of Global South, non-white nativist identity; the need to recognise some key conjunctural premises by which the anticolonial is no longer geographically indexed to a straightforward Global North-Global South distinction; and the need to acknowledge that, at its most radical, anticolonial thought is itself still invested in traversing both the dreams but also corruptions of those dreams as intrinsic to modernity., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This paper responds to Julian Go's Lecture "Thinking against Empire. Anti-colonial Thought and Social Theory." It proceeds in two parts: I first follow Go's invitation to read and reread Mabel Dove Danquah and Frantz Fanon and explore what their work contributes to our understanding of state-forms. I then examine the terms of Go's invitation more closely. I contrast Go's juxtaposition of imperial sociology on the one hand and anti-colonial sociology on the other hand, with the broader range of theoretical traditions and methods, which a practice-oriented sociology of sociology and an international history of sociology would highlight. I raise the question what "standpoint" adds to the authors Go discusses and the broader range of scholars who have engaged with post-colonial contexts in their research at this point in time. Calling for consideration of the anti-colonial standpoint is a particular choice, which has a distinctive heritage in Hegelian-Marxian projections of the social whole and is in tension with either deep exploration of particular thinkers or the middle-range theorizing that Go also seems to endorse. Defined at a level of abstraction that is "above" (or underneath) actual conversations in a range of fields and subfields, it can appear as a "test" for scholars who have long engaged with post-colonial contexts, which can have unintended consequences when coupled with the institutional power and asymmetric insularity of Anglo-American academia., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This article develops a novel account of middle-range theories for combining theoretical and empirical analysis in explanatory sociology. I first revisit Robert K. Merton's original ideas on middle-range theories and identify a tension between his developmental approach to middle-range theorizing that recognizes multiple functions of theories in sociological research and his static definition of the concept of middle-range theory that focuses only on empirical testing of theories. Drawing on Merton's ideas on theorizing and recent discussions on mechanism-based explanations, I argue that this tension can be resolved by decomposing a middle-range theory into three interrelated and evolving components that perform different functions in sociological research: (i) a conceptual framework about social phenomena that is a set of interrelated concepts that evolve in close connection with empirical analysis; (ii) a mechanism schema that is an abstract and incomplete description of a social mechanism; and (iii) a cluster of all mechanism-based explanations of social phenomena that are based on the particular mechanism schema. I show how these components develop over time and how they serve different functions in sociological theorizing and research. Finally, I illustrate these ideas by discussing Merton's theory of the Matthew effect in science and its more recent applications in sociology., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

In Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory, Julian Go continues his vital work on rethinking and redirecting the discipline of sociology. Go's piece relates to his wider oeuvre of postcolonial sociology – found in works such as his Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) as well as multiple journal articles on epistemic exclusion (Go 2020), Southern theory (Go 2016), metrocentrism (Go 2014), and the history of sociology (Go 2009). In this response article, my aim is to think alongside some of the central themes outlined in Go's paper rather than offering a rebuttal of any sorts. In particular, I want to think through how the recent work on 'decoloniality' may play more of a central role in Go's vision of sociology and social theory than he acknowledges. In doing so, I hope to engage in Go's prodigious scholarship through centering discussions of the geopolitics of knowledge, double translation, and border thinking. Before proceeding to this discussion, I will offer a brief review of my reading of Go's paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution engages Go's generative invitation to think against empire by thinking through the epistemic and disciplinary implications of such endeavour. I zoom in on the need to explicitly address the purpose and ethos of scholarly inquiry and how that translates into decolonial academic praxis. Thinking with Go's invitation to think against empire, I feel compelled to constructively engage the limitations and impossibilities of decolonising disciplines such as Sociology. I glean from the various attempts at inclusion and diversity in society and argue that adding or including Anticolonial Social Thought/marginalised voices and peoples in the existing corridors of power-such as canons or advisory boards-is at best a minimal rather than a sufficient condition of decolonisation or going against empire. This raises the question of what comes after inclusion. Rather than offer a 'correct' or single alternative anticolonial way, the paper explores the pluriversally inspired method(ological) avenues that appear when we commit to thinking about what happens after inclusion when the goal is decolonisation. I expand on my 'discovery' and engagement with the figure and political thought of Thomas Sankara and how this led me to abolitionist thought. The paper then offers a patchwork of methodological considerations when engaging the what, how, why?-questions of research. I engage with questions of purpose, mastery, and colonial science and turn to the generative potential of approaches such as grounding, Connected Sociologies, epistemic Blackness, and curating as methods. Thinking with abolition and Shilliam's (2015) distinction between colonial and decolonial science, between knowledge production and knowledge cultivation, the paper invites us to not only think of what we need to do more of or better when taking Anticolonial Social Thought seriously, but also what we might need to let go of., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Critical race theory is growing in popularity in Britain. However, critics and advocates of critical race theory (CRT) in Britain have neglected the racialized social system approach. Through ignoring this approach, critics have thus "missed the target" in their rebuttals of CRT, while advocates of CRT have downplayed the strength of critical race analysis. By contrast, in this paper, I argue that that through the racialized social system approach, critical race theory has the conceptual flexibility to study British society. As a practical social theory, critical race theory provides us with the tools to study the realities and reproduction of racial inequality. To demonstrate this strength of CRT, and to demonstrate its theoretical nature, I discuss the conceptual framework of the racialized social system approach, paying specific attention to the notions of social space, the racial structure and racial interests; the racialized interaction order, racialized emotions, and structure and agency; and racial ideology, racial grammar, and racialized cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary critiques Betthäuser, Bourne and Bukodi's (2020) paper which finds that cognitive ability does not substantially mediate class of origin effects on educational and occupational outcomes. From these results, they conclude that cognitive ability is only of minor importance for social stratification, reasserting their view of the primacy of class origins for social stratification. The central issue surrounding cognitive ability in social stratification is its effects on socioeconomic attainments vis‐à‐vis socioeconomic origins, not the extent that cognitive ability mediates classorigin effects. Their analytical strategy of estimating the extent that cognitive ability mediates class origineffects is misleading because: it ignores the only moderate associations of socioeconomic origins with educational and occupational outcomes; the stronger direct effects of cognitive ability; the associations of parents' ability with their own socioeconomic attainments; and the genetic transmission of cognitive ability and other traits relevant to social stratification from parents to their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Our sense of belonging rarely stands still, yet the research literature has hitherto paid little attention to the temporal nature of belonging. Based on an analysis of 62 Mass Observation Project (MOP) accounts written by people living in the UK aged from their 20s to their 90s, this paper argues that as people age, how they locate belonging in time shifts. This has to do with changing concerns related to belonging, but also to metaphysical issues of temporality and mortality, namely how people experience their own finite lifetime. The paper thus offers an illustrative example of how time can be empirically researched in sociology, with a particular focus on the important role that the future plays in how people construct their ‘functional present’ (Mead ). The central argument put forward is that time itself can be an important source of belonging, but one that is unequally accessible to people of different ages because of contemporary cultural scripts that present life as a linear progression into the future and construct the future as a more meaningful temporal horizon than the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an effort to understand Hogarth's unique position in early eighteenth century London, so as to grasp the rich complexity of his work. It begins by tracing two rival competing positions in the sociology of art, derived from Becker and Bourdieu, before taking a closer look at how Hogarth's work conjures up a new vision of the world, providing shape and meaning to the nation's changing understandings of morality, society, and the city. A fundamental transformation in the field of representation appears halfway through the eighteenth century and the interweaving of art theory, national identity, and systems of patronage are at the centre of this dynamic period. It is no accident that in Hogarth's world the main targets are those who seek to transgress their stations in life and cross class barriers. By combining two different sociological approaches to art the study builds a more nuanced picture of the artist and his work., (© 2021 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This paper explores temporal constituents of the female self in terms of their role in underpinning ongoing gender inequality. Drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young, together with sociological approaches to ambivalence, I suggest that these temporal subjectivities are embodied, arise from the split subjectivity associated with woman as simultaneously subject and object, and counterpose the neoliberal emphasis on "choice" and agency with a more traditional gendered "expectation," or "waiting" style. The dialectic between both temporalities, in which neither is hegemonic, results in a chronic state of ambivalence which impedes women's ability to fully project themselves into the future, a skill significant to planning and career ambition and the absence of which suspends women instead in an extended present. The paper aims to do two things in particular. In conceptual terms it aims to explore aspects of the configuration of the gendered self that underlie the stalling and slowing down of the gender revolution and which can be seen to provide a "missing link" between structures, institutions, and micro‐cultures. In empirical terms, it suggests a future research agenda, of which this paper constitutes a beginning, through which such gendered temporalities can be explored in greater detail via ethnographies of women's lived experience of time throughout the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to Nick Gane's "Against a descriptive turn". I argue that descriptive research strategies are more open and inclusive than those which purport to be causal where explanatory adequacy is assessed by expert insiders. I also show how open descriptive strategies can assist a wider explanatory purpose when these are conceived in non‐positivist ways. I argue that epochalist sociology lacks an adequate temporal ontology because it collapses descriptive specificity back into overarching epoch descriptions. Finally, I argue that if the entire range of publications associated with the Great British Class Survey are considered, that it has demonstrated a productive way of recognising the significance of class which has facilitated major research advances in its wake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the concept of 'fetishism' as an explanatory parameter in sociological theorizing on Durkheimian grounds, while at the same time paying due attention to important insights regarding the role of objects in social life, originating from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It critically assesses the current critique of the concept of fetishism propagated by ANT protagonist Bruno Latour. Latour and suggests a compromise between these two 'schools'. First, to place the paper firmly in context, I analyse some examples of modern fetishism and outline the themes of the ensuing discussion. Next, I turn to Durkheim, seeking to develop a distinct interpretation of the concept of the social and of fetishism, and then point to some of Durkheim's shortcomings and attempt to make room for Latourian perspectives. Finally, I critically assess Latour's dismissal of forms of social 'explanation' and of the concept of fetishism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging 'aesthetic turn' within sociology which currently lacks clear focus. This paper reviews the different issues feeding into this interest and contributes to its development. Previous renderings of this relationship have set the aesthetic up against sociology, as an emphasis which 'troubles' conventional understandings of sociality and offers no ready way of reconciling the aesthetic with the social. Reflecting on the contributions of recent social theorists, from figures including Bourdieu, Born, Rancière, Deleuze, and Martin, we argue instead for the value of a social aesthetic which critiques instrumentalist and reductive understandings of the social itself. In explicating what form this might take, the latter parts of the paper take issue with classical modernist conceptions of the aesthetic which continue to dominate popular and sociological understandings of the aesthetic, and uses the motif of 'walking' to show how the aesthetic can be rendered in terms of 'the mundane search' and how this search spans everyday experience and cultural re-production. We offer a provisional definition of social aesthetics as the embedded and embodied process of meaning making which, by acknowledging the physical/corporeal boundaries and qualities of the inhabited world, also allows imagination to travel across other spaces and times. It is hoped that this approach can be a useful platform for further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While description is a valuable aspect of meaningful sociological work, this paper takes issue with Mike Savage's argument that the social sciences, and sociology in particular, should seek to prioritize description over practices of explanation and analysis, and attention to questions of causality.  The aim of this paper is not to take issue with descriptive forms of sociology in themselves, but to argue that the answer to the problems identified by Savage and Burrows in their landmark paper "The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology" is not to follow commercial forms of research by prioritizing practices of description and classification at the cost of asking fundamental questions about the "why?" and the "how?" of social life and politics. Rather, this paper argues that it is imperative that sociology does not simply describe inequalities of different types, but questions, explains, and analyses the structures and mechanisms through which they are created, reproduced, and sustained. The argument will be developed in three stages. First, this paper will restate the main points of Savage's call for descriptive sociology; second, it will address his critique of "epochalist thinking" and subsequent opposition to the idea of neoliberalism; and third, it will respond to his use of Thomas Piketty's work as a model for developing sociological descriptions of class and inequality., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as 'the social' is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of 'social' is performed or invented. Based on a long-term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of 'the social'. This paper explores the quality and kinds of spaces made for 'the social' in professional practices and academic collaborations, focusing on two case studies of urban lighting that demonstrate how the space of 'the social' is constrained and impoverished by an institutionalized division between technical and aesthetic lighting. We consider the potential role of sociologists in making more productive spaces for 'the social' in urban design, as part of the central sociological task of 'inventing the social' (Marres, Guggenheim and Wilkie 2018) in the process of studying it., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

This paper makes the case for cross-domain comparison as an undertheorized form of comparative analysis. The units of analysis in such comparisons are not (as in most comparative analysis) predefined units within a domain or system of formally similar yet substantively different categories or entities; they are the domains or systems of categorically organized differences themselves. Focusing on domains of categorical difference that are central to the contemporary politics of difference, we consider two examples of cross-domain comparison. The first compares sex/gender and race/ethnicity as systems of ascribed identities that are increasingly, yet to differing degrees and in differing ways, open to choice and change. The second compares religion and language as domains of categorically organized cultural difference that are centrally implicated in the politics of cultural pluralism. We situate these cross-domain comparisons, premised on a logic of 'different differences', between generalizing and particularizing approaches to the politics of difference, arguing that these domains are similar enough to make comparison meaningful yet different enough to make comparison interesting. We outline five analytical focal points for cross-domain comparison: the criteria of membership and belonging, the categorical versus gradational structure of variation within domains of difference, the consolidation or proliferation of categories of difference, the procedures for dealing with mixed or difficult-to-classify instances, and the relation between categories of difference and the production and reproduction of inequality. We conclude by considering several potential objections to cross-domain comparison., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

While much attention has been devoted to measuring levels of social mobility over time, less attention has been given to the possibility of changing pathways to social mobility. This paper examines pathways from social origins to socio‐economic destinations in midlife for two British cohorts, born in 1958 and 1970 respectively, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). We address the roles of cognitive attainment, private schooling and educational attainment in mediating the link between social origins and destinations. Have these mechanisms become more or less important over time, in a context of structural change in the state schooling system and educational expansion? We find that private schools displayed greater academic selectivity and an increased link to high levels of educational attainment for the younger cohort. Essentially, private schools adapted to changing circumstances, becoming more academically selective and less socially selective, and more focused on educational credentials. Childhood social origins were less strongly linked to childhood cognitive scores in the younger cohort, but cognitive scores were also more weakly linked to educational attainment for this cohort. We also find a decreased association between social origins and educational attainment for the younger cohort. While the finding that educational inequalities weakened over this time period is positive, the lack of a corresponding reduction in the overall link between social origins and destinations suggests that reducing educational inequalities was not sufficient to increase social mobility when accompanied by countervailing changes in the role of private schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the value of a normative account of the relationship between agents and institutions for contemporary efforts to explain ever more complex and disorganized forms of social life. The character of social institutions, as they relate to practices, agents and norms, is explored through an engagement with the common claim that family life has been de-institutionalized. The paper argues that a normative rather than empirical definition of institutions avoids a false distinction between institutions and practices. Drawing on ideas of social freedom and creative action from critical theory, the changes in family life are explained not as an effect of de-institutionalization, but as a shift from an organized to a disorganized institutional type. This is understood as a response to changes in the wider normative structure, as a norm of individual freedom has undermined the legitimacy of the organized patriarchal nuclear family, with gender ascribed roles and associated duties. Contemporary motherhood is drawn on to illustrate the value of analysing the dynamic interactions between institutions, roles and practices for capturing both the complexity and the patterned quality of social experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the empirical, conceptual and theoretical gains that can be made using cosmopolitan social theory to think through the urban transformations that scholars have in recent years termed planetary urbanization. Recognizing the global spread of urbanization makes the need for a cosmopolitan urban sociology more pressing than ever. Here, it is suggested that critical urban sociology can be invigorated by focusing upon the disconnect that Henri Lefebvre posits between the planetarization of the urban - which he views as economically and technologically driven - and his dis-alienated notion of a global urban society. The first aim of this paper is to highlight the benefits of using 'cosmopolitan' social theory to understand Lefebvre's urban problematic (and to establish why this is also a cosmopolitan problematic) ; the second is to identify the core cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization, tensions that are both actually existing and reproduced in scholarly accounts. The article begins by examining the challenges presented to urban sociology by planetary urbanization, before considering how cosmopolitan sociological theory helps provide an analytical 'grip' on the deep lying social realities of contemporary urbanization, especially in relation to questions about difference, culture and history. These insights are used to identify three cosmopolitan contradictions that exist within urbanized (and urbanizing) space; tensions that provide a basis for a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan investigation of planetary urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that encounters between welfare bureaucracies and their clients have been reconfigured under neoliberalism to address the problem of "welfare dependency." Contemporary bureaucratic encounters therefore entail measures to activate clients' entrepreneurial/self‐governing capacities, and conditionality/sanctioning practices to deal with clients who behave "irresponsibly." Despite the dominance of the neoliberal model, recent research has identified a counter‐trend in the practices of housing services away from entrepreneurializing and punitive strategies and towards a more supportive approach. This paper examines this counter‐trend and its implications for neoliberal welfare governance. To do this, it presents findings from research into social housing governance in Queensland, Australia, where the neoliberal focus on welfare independence, conditionality and sanctioning has been tempered by a new supportive approach focused on assisting vulnerable clients to maintain and benefit from access to welfare/housing support. Following Larner, we argue that this shift signals the emergence of an "after neoliberal" governmental formation, wherein key features of neoliberal governmentality are replaced by, or redeployed in the service of, progressive initiatives that address neoliberalism's failings at the street level, but leave broader neoliberal policy settings undisturbed. We also challenge recent sociological accounts that construe supportive welfare practices as a function of an all‐encompassing neoliberal project, arguing instead for appreciation of the contingency of these developments and the progressive political affordances that they entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative data of an upper‐secondary school in Sweden's primary elite community, Djursholm, I propose how medical diagnosis of students as dyslexics contributes to consecrating them by offering a short cut to successful performance, while at the same time reproducing differences between social classes. The study suggests how students that do not score top can be labeled dyslexic and the social and moral consequences of that. I introduce the concept of "consecrating medicalization" in order to discriminate between the effects of medical diagnosis of members of different social classes. In this way, this paper contributes to further examining some key problems in medical sociology and the sociology of elites, by offering a framework of synthesis and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Fine was among the most original social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years, and the aim of this paper is to offer a first systematic assessment of his intellectual contribution. There are sound intellectual reasons to explore Fine's scholarship. He maintained a problematic relation with mainstream sociology and, against the reduction of sociology to questions of method, culture, or class, he argued that sociologists must continue to ask difficult normative questions as part of the social world they ought to explain. And there are also pressing political concerns that justify a reconsideration of his writings. Global politics is currently marked by a populist wave that decries the very ideas and values that were central to Fine's social theory: the need to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, the politics of cosmopolitan solidarity, and the significance of antisemitism and its relationships with different forms of authoritarian politics. My main argument is that there is a dialectics of universality that drives forward Fine's intellectual project. By this, I mean that a universalistic idea of humanity—an all‐inclusive conception of all human beings—is the most important normative intuition of modern times. This idea of humanity moves forward in history through a dual process of emancipation and domination: successful forms of social, legal, and political inclusion help make visible previous dynamics of exclusion but may also create or recreate discriminatory practices. Building on the work of French historian Michael Löwy on heterodox Jewish thinkers, I explain the three main tenets of Fine's work: (a) his reconstruction of critical social theory; (b) the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity; and (c) the significance and main features of modern antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses ethnographic data to engage a critical reflection on the tension between individual responsibility for the environment and inequality. While research has shown that the majority of sustainable consumers are middle and upper class, educated and white individuals, the study explores how the ethical injunction to ecological sustainability is being introduced to lower‐income neighbourhoods in France. It draws on the observation of a national programme which aims at supporting inhabitants of public housing estates in the process of greening their lifestyle in order to fight climate change and fuel poverty. The paper analyses how environmental responsibilization is specific in that it calls upon a responsibility towards others, towards the common good. Using the Foucauldian concept of 'subjectivation', it describes and analyses the moral work implied by such behaviour change programmes. It demonstrates that a negative representation of poor households and a moral framing of the responsibility for the environment lead to a moralization of their lifestyle under the heading of 'eco‐friendly behaviours'. A paradoxical result of such endeavours is that the social group with the least impactful lifestyle on the environment is the one which is moralized in the most intrusive and resolute manner. The article shows, however, that the tenants manage to resist the normalizing discourse on sustainable living, for reasons which are not anti‐environmentalist. This piece thus provides interesting results for sustainability studies as well as for the sociology of the regulation of underprivileged neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and 'groupishness' of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field theorists have long insisted that research needs to pay attention to the particular properties of each field studied. But while much field-theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from each other. In this context, this paper articulates an agenda for the analysis of variable properties of fields. It discusses variation in the degree but also in the kind of field autonomy. It discusses different dimensions of variation in field structure: fields can be more or less contested, and more or less hierarchical. The structure of symbolic oppositions in a field may take different forms. Lastly, it analyses the dimensions of variation highlighted by research on fields on the sub- and transnational scale. Post-national analysis allows us to ask how fields relate to fields of the same kind on different scales, and how fields relate to fields on the same scale in other national contexts. It allows us to ask about the role resources from other scales play in structuring symbolic oppositions within fields. A more fine-tuned vocabulary for field variation can help us better describe particular fields and it is a precondition for generating hypotheses about the conditions under which we can expect to observe fields with specified characteristics., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

Lay perceptions and experiences of social location have been commonly framed with reference to social class. However, complex responses to, and ambivalence over, class categories have raised interesting analytic questions relating to how sociological concepts are operationalized in empirical research. For example, prior researchers have argued that processes of class dis-identification signify moral unease with the nature of classed inequalities, yet dis-identification may also in part reflect a poor fit between 'social class' as a category and the ways in which people accord meaning to, and evaluate, their related experiences of socio-economic inequality. Differently framed questions about social comparison, aligned more closely with people's own terms of reference, offer an interesting alternative avenue for exploring subjective experiences of inequality. This paper explores some of these questions through an analysis of new empirical data, generated in the context of recession. In the analysis reported here, class identification was common. Nevertheless, whether or not people self identified in class terms, class relevant issues were perceived and described in highly diverse ways, and lay views on class revealed it to be a very aggregated as well as multifaceted construct. It is argued that it enables a particular, not general, perspective on social comparison. The paper therefore goes on to examine how study participants compared themselves with familiar others, identified by themselves. The evidence illuminates social positioning in terms of constraint, agency and (for some) movement, and offers insight into very diverse experiences of inequality, through the comparisons that people made. Their comparisons are situated, and pragmatic, accounts of the material contexts in which people live their lives. Linked evaluations are circumscribed and strongly tied to these proximate material contexts.The paper draws out implications for theorizing lay perspectives on class, and subjective experiences of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics related to sociology.

Abstract: This paper offers a defence of sociology through an engagement with Actor Network Theory (ANT) and particularly the critique of ‘critical’ and politically engaged social science developed by Bruno Latour. It argues that ANT identifies some weaknesses in more conventional sociology and social theory, and suggests that ‘critical’ and ‘public’ orientated sociologists can learn from the analytical precision and ethnographic sensibilities that characterize ANT as a framework of analysis and a research programme. It argues, however, that Latour et al. have too hastily dispensed with ‘critique’ in favour of a value neutral descriptive sociology, and that the symmetrical and horizontalist approach adopted in ANT is particularly ill‐suited to the development of scientific knowledge about social structures. It argues that a more straightforwardly realist sociology would share many of the strengths of ANT whilst being better able to interrogate, empirically and normatively, the centres of contemporary social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a re-thinking of the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences. Tracing lines of connection between the history of sociology and the contemporary landscape of biology, the paper argues for a reconfiguration of this relationship beyond popular rhetorics of 'biologization' or 'medicalization'. At the heart of the paper is a claim that, today, there are some potent new frames for re-imagining the traffic between sociological and biological research - even for 'revitalizing' the sociological enterprise as such. The paper threads this argument through one empirical case: the relationship between urban life and mental illness. In its first section, it shows how this relationship enlivened both early psychiatric epidemiology, and some forms of the new discipline of sociology; it then traces the historical division of these sciences, as the sociological investment in psychiatric questions waned, and 'the social' become marginalized within an increasingly 'biological' psychiatry. In its third section, however, the paper shows how this relationship has lately been revivified, but now by a nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention to the links between mental health and urban life. What role can sociology play here? In its final section, the paper shows how this older sociology, with its lively interest in the psychiatric and neurobiological vicissitudes of urban social life, can be our guide in helping to identify intersections between sociological and biological attention. With a new century now underway, the paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between urban life and mental illness may prove a core testing-ground for a 'revitalized' sociology., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2016.)

This paper examines the significance of experiences and understandings of targeted harassment to the identities of youth subcultural participants, through case study research on goths. It does so against a context of considerable recent public discussion about the victimization of alternative subcultures and a surprising scarcity of academic research on the subject. The analysis presented indicates that, although individual direct experiences are diverse, the spectre of harassment can form an ever-present accompaniment to subcultural life, even for those who have never been seriously targeted. As such, it forms part of what it is to be a subcultural participant and comprises significant common ground with other members. Drawing upon classic and more recent understandings of how subcultural groups respond to broader forms of outside hostility, we show how the shared experience of feeling targeted for harassment tied in with a broader subcultural discourse of being stigmatized by a perceived 'normal' society. The role of harassment as part of this, we argue, contributed to the strength with which subcultural identities were felt and to a positive embrace of otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper frames the work of performance as embodied labour in order to understand the contingent production of particular music performances. It is an interdisciplinary account that sits at the intersection of the sociology of work, culture and the body. The concept of embodied labour is developed with reference to the complex account of materiality - of bodies and things - present in Tim Ingold's account of skill. This material account of skill is used to inform use to develop already of well established conceptualizations of body labour: craft, emotional and aesthetic labour through a reading of how these dimensions of embodied labour make possible the work of performance., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015.)

This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbolic action that constitute the object of sociology. The state, which Bourdieu considers a 'meta'-ordering principle in social life, ensures that sociology has a well-ordered object of study, vis-à-vis which it can posit itself as 'meta-meta'. The state thus functions as an epistemic guarantee in Bourdieu's sociology. A critical analysis of Bourdieu's sociology of the state offers the chance of a more fundamental overall assessment of Bourdieu's conception of sociology that has relevance for any critical sociological perspective that rests on the assumption of a meta-social entity, such as the state in Bourdieu's work, as a final ordering instance., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015.)

Sociologists have increasingly come to recognize that the discipline has unduly privileged textual representations, but efforts to incorporate visual and other media are still only in their beginning. This paper develops an analysis of the ways objects of knowledge are translated into other media, in order to understand the visual practices of sociology and to point out unused possibilities. I argue that the discourse on visual sociology, by assuming that photographs are less objective than text, is based on an asymmetric media-determinism and on a misleading notion of objectivity. Instead, I suggest to analyse media with the concept of translations. I introduce several kinds of translations, most centrally the distinction between tight and loose ones. I show that many sciences, such as biology, focus on tight translations, using a variety of media and manipulating both research objects and representations. Sociology, in contrast, uses both tight and loose translations, but uses the latter only for texts. For visuals, sociology restricts itself to what I call 'the documentary': focusing on mechanical recording technologies without manipulating either the object of research or the representation. I conclude by discussing three rare examples of what is largely excluded in sociology: visual loose translations, visual tight translations based on non-mechanical recording technologies, and visual tight translations based on mechanical recording technologies that include the manipulation of both object and representation., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015.)

In this paper, I take Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the starting point for a set of twelve policy proposals that could bring about a genuine shift in the distribution of income towards less inequality. In designing the set of proposals, I draw on the experience of reducing inequality in postwar Europe and on an analysis as to how the economic circumstances are now different in the twenty-first century, highlighting the role of technical change and the rise in capital emphasized by Piketty. The proposed measures span many fields of policy, and are not confined to fiscal redistribution, encompassing science policy, competition policy, public employment, a guaranteed return on small savings, a capital endowment, as well as more progressive taxation of income and wealth transfers, and a participation income. Inequality is embedded in our social structure, and the search for a significant reduction requires us to examine all aspects of our society. I focus on inequality within countries, and what can be achieved by national governments, with the UK specifically in mind. The primary audience is those concerned with policy-making in national governments, but implementation should not be seen purely in these terms. There are different levels of government, and certain proposals, particularly those concerned with taxation, may only be feasible if pursued by a group of countries in collaboration. The last of the twelve proposals - for a basic income for children - is specifically directed at the European Union. Finally, actions by individuals as consumers, as workers, or as employers, can all contribute to reducing inequality., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014.)

Piketty's Capital (2014) primarily describes and analyses changes in the distribution of wealth and annual incomes. This paper focuses on his policy proposals that make up Part Four of the book. Piketty defends the 'social state' but he discusses it largely in terms of distribution and redistribution between tax units. This neglects the important role of social policy in promoting recognition and redistribution of income and opportunities that is related to gender, race, disability and sexual orientation. Nor does Piketty consider inequalities in health which effect life-time incomes, nor the impact of housing policies on house prices and the distribution of wealth. It is argued that Piketty's approach to social security is simplistic and plays down the complexity of competing policy goals. On taxation, Piketty defends progressive taxation and proposes a global capital levy. The latter proposal runs into formidable problems in seeking global taxation in a world of nation states. Rather than seeking a policy that is, for the foreseeable future, wholly politically impractical, a case is made for less idealistic but more practical and urgent tax coordination between nations to address the widespread avoidance of taxation that large corporations and the very wealthy are now permitted - taxation on which the future of the social state depends. The importance of human and social capital, which are largely set aside by Piketty, are discussed. Finally,it is argued that his approach to policy is to describe trends and propose amelioration of growing inequality rather than to identify causes of the trends and propose policies that might address the causes. Nevertheless, the importance of his work in bringing issues of inequality to the fore, especially among economists, is recognized and applauded., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014.)

This paper is a response to a recent article dealing with the concept of value-free sociology by Donald Black. It argues that while a defence of Weber's position on the role of values in sociological research is necessary and important, what is offered by Black is counter-productive in important respects. This is because it encourages some of the misunderstandings that it is aimed at remedying and, even more importantly, offers a simplistic discussion of what are complex issues., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014.)

Rancière published two substantial criticisms of the work of Bourdieu in the early 1980s. It is possible that these were provoked by his sense that he needed to oppose what he considered to be the sociological reduction of aesthetic taste offered by Bourdieu in Distinction (Bourdieu 1986 [1979]) at precisely the moment when he (Rancière) was beginning to articulate his commitment to the potential of aesthetic expression as a mode of political resistance. Except in so far as it draws upon some of the retrospective reflections offered by Rancière in his introductions to the re-issues of his early texts, this paper examines the parallel development of the thinking of the two men up to the mid-1980s - but not beyond. The discussion is situated socio-historically and, by definition, does not seek to offer comparatively any transhistorical assessment of the values of the positions adopted by the two men. I argue that Rancière misrepresented the character of Bourdieu's sociological work by failing to recognize the underlying phenomenological orientation of his thinking. Bourdieu suppressed this orientation in the 1960s but, after the May events of 1968, it enabled him to expose the extent to which the practices of both science and art operate within constructed 'fields' in strategic distinction from popular primary experience. The challenge is to introduce an ongoing dialogue between primary and constructed cultures rather than to suppose that either social science or art possesses intrinsic autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many aspects of social life possess an emotional component, sociology needs to explore explicitly the part emotions play in producing the social world and human history. This paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases upon the experience of feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of 'affect' (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. It establishes a materialist sociology of affects that acknowledges emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalized affective flow that produces bodies and the social world. From this perspective, emotions are not a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. This enhances sociological understanding of the part emotions play in shaping actions and capacities in many settings of sociological concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is becoming increasingly common to hear life scientists say that high quality life science research relies upon high quality laboratory animal care. However, the idea that animal care is a crucial part of scientific knowledge production is at odds with previous social science and historical scholarship regarding laboratory animals. How are we to understand this discrepancy? To begin to address this question, this paper seeks to disentangle the values of scientists in identifying animal care as important to the production of high quality scientific research. To do this, we conducted a survey of scientists working in the United Kingdom who use animals in their research. The survey found that being British is associated with thinking that animal care is a crucial part of conducting high quality science. To understand this finding, we draw upon the concept of 'civic epistemologies' (Jasanoff 2005; Prainsack 2006) and argue that 'animals' and 'care' in Britain may converge in taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes good scientific knowledge. These ideas travel through things like state regulations or the editorial policies of science journals, but do not necessarily carry the embodied civic epistemology of 'animals' and 'science' from which such modes of regulating laboratory animal welfare comes.

This article presents an ethnographic study of politics of waiting in a post-Soviet context. While activation has been explored in sociological and anthropological literature as a neo-liberal governmental technology and its application in post-socialist context has also been compellingly documented, waiting as a political artefact has only recently been receiving increased scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a state-run unemployment office in Riga, this article shows how, alongside activation, state welfare policies also produce passivity and waiting. Engaging with the small but developing field of sociological literature on the politics of waiting, I argue that, rather than interpreting it as a clash between 'neo-liberal' and 'Soviet' regimes, we should understand the double-move of activation and imposition of waiting as a key mechanism of neo-liberal biopolitics. This article thus extends the existing theorizations of the temporal politics of neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates regarding the status of age in social analysis are foundational to the sociology of aging, with scholars continually questioning the role of age as a social force. The contemporary politicization of age in British politics sheds useful light on this debate. During the past decade, age has emerged as a potent predictor of political preference in the United Kingdom, encompassing numerous intertwined political economic developments. At face value, the emergence of age as a key political variable substantiates the status of age in social analysis. However, I argue that it is articulations of age‐stratified politics, as much as the associations themselves, that should be of principle concern for the sociology of aging, because such articulations are reformulating age, aging and intergenerational relations. The sociology of aging should, therefore, engage with the contemporary politicization of age as a new answer to foundational debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on part‐time work has concentrated over many decades on the experiences of women but male part‐time employment is growing in the UK. This article addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part‐timers: are men's part‐time jobs of lower quality than men's full‐time jobs? Are male part‐timers more or less job‐satisfied compared to their full‐time peers? A fundamental part of both interrogations is whether men's part‐time employment varies by occupational class. The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part‐timers. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the "grateful slave" debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low‐quality part‐time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part‐time employment. Based upon analysis of a large quantitative data set, the results provide clear evidence of low‐quality male part‐time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full‐time jobs. Men working part‐time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part‐timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear "lead" both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. The article asks whether decreasingly satisfied male part‐time workers should be termed "ungrateful slaves?" It unpacks the "grateful slave" metaphor and, after doing so, rejects its value for the ongoing analysis of part‐time jobs in the formal labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which the white working‐class residents of a suburban English town reflect on their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors. Its focus is on how everyday constructions of home become sites for the intermingling of discourses of intercultural conviviality and racism. My contention is that the idea of home has not yet been given the detailed critical attention that it deserves in the sociological literature on everyday manifestations of multiculturalism, conviviality, and racism. My supposition is that a special focus on the idea of home as the site of conviviality offers a productive avenue to analyze how intercultural relationships are formed and how the norms of neighborliness are thought to break down, opening a space for commonplace racialized and racist stereotypes to take hold. The idea of home is central to the rhythm and landscape of the English suburbs. It conjures up the idea of a uniform and aspirational white space. Drawing on this imaginary of home, I shall trace how "white working class" "English," "Scottish," and "Anglo‐Italian" residents' everyday constructions of home become embroiled with their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with returning to sexual stigma in two key respects. First, it prompts a return to the conceptual understanding of sexual stigma and makes an important contribution to critiques of the individualized frameworks that have dominated much of the literature on stigma to date, through a critical analysis of sexual stigma as a collective process at different scales and locations. Second, using empirical data from a qualitative study of post‐trafficking experiences of women in Nepal as a case study to develop theoretical understandings of the production of stigma, it explores modalities of sexualized stigma encountered on return from trafficking situations. Within the trafficking literature there has been very little attention to what happens after trafficking. This article addresses this gap in focusing on lives post‐trafficking and, in addition, contributes to the limited research on trafficking in Nepal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within existing academic literature, ageing within trans populations has primarily been addressed from the perspective of offering advice to service providers and clinicians, with relatively limited application of critical sociological perspectives. This article seeks to integrate the critical perspectives on gerontology with transfeminism, identifying areas of commonality regarding accounts of an integrated lifecourse, scepticism of biomedicalization, and an emphasis on local context. The article suggests that this integration provides a fruitful basis for developing future research into the study of trans ageing, and also provides theoretical development across many debates around age, gender and the lifecourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses sociology in terms of complementary strengths and areas of expertise as a team sport. Topics include consideration of combination of cultural and social structural factors to enable and constrain different causal processes and outcomes; failing of cultural narratives contribute to social crisis; and successful religious and humanistic discourses helps in creating good narratives in future with moral lessons to life fostering identification and empathy.