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The authors discuss issues related to "Sociology," including statistics on article submissions in 2014 and plans for the electronic special issues of the journal.

In this introductory article we critically discuss where the study of race in sociology has travelled, with the benefit of previously published articles in Sociology supported by correspondence from article authors. We make the argument for sociologies of race that go beyond surface level reconstructions, and which challenge sociologists to reflect on how their discipline is presently configured. What the suite of papers in this collection shows is both the resilience of race as a construct for organising social relations and the slippery fashion in which ideas of race have shifted, transmuted and pluralised. It is in a spirit of recognising continuity and change that we present this collection. Some of the papers already stand as landmark essays, while others exemplify key moments in the broader teleology of race studies. This includes articles that explore the ontological ground upon which ideas of race, citizenship and black identity have been fostered and the need to develop a global sociology that is critically reflexive of its western orientation. The theme of continuity and change can be seen in papers that showcase intersectional approaches to race, where gender, nationality, generation and class offer nuanced readings of everyday life, alongside the persistence of institutional forms of discrimination. As this work demonstrates, middle-class forms of whiteness often go ‘hiding in the light’ yet can be made visible if we consider how parental school choice, or selecting where to live are also recognised as racially informed decisions. The range and complexity of these debates not only reflect the vitality of race in the contemporary period but lead us to ask not so much if race ends here, but where? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates shared reading between parents and young children, theorised as 'sensory affinities', understood through a sociological lens. I argue that reading cannot be confined to educational aspects, and towards increased prominence for relational dimensions. I explore the narratives of 29 parents/carers of reading with young children. Drawing on data on the embodied aspects of reading, Mason's concept of affinities illuminates the sensory facets of reading applied to family intimacies. Interventions have hitherto distilled literacy from the wider social context. However, an understanding of reading in the context of families from diverse backgrounds, yields insights into the sensory character of everyday family life. Findings are of significance to sociology broadly, and specifically, families and relationships. Centring families facilitates a fuller understanding of literacy practices. Finally, the focus on an everyday, tangible practice such as reading can support understandings of hidden and taken-for-granted dimensions of family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Sociology was established in 1967, the journal has assumed a significant role in shaping the discipline. In the interim years it is often said that the very practice of sociology has now ‘spun out’ beyond the dedicated departments that were once the centres of sociological practice. This raises questions as to the relationship between sociology and other disciplines, questions that are compelling and arguably distinct from a welcome recognition of sociology’s undoubted intellectual hybridity. The extent to which this is a productive tension or one that requires a resolution is an ongoing conversation to which this special issue speaks. In this introductory article we take what we consider to be an innovative route that is guided by the theme of ‘Bringing Sociology Home’ whilst simultaneously recognising the enormous strengths brought by the multidisciplinary developments of the last 50 volumes. We set out the terrain before introducing a mixture of short and substantive papers from contributors, as well as interviews, with scholars who have made a contribution to the study of the discipline of sociology both inside and beyond the pages of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Securing, and negotiating, privacy with intimate bodily needs is an ordinary but often hidden feature of our personal lives. Drawing upon a UK-based qualitative study that utilised diaries and follow-up interviews to explore everyday life with the health condition irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), this article explores the navigations of privacy when anticipating or experiencing symptoms. Building upon sociological understandings of privacy and personal life, this article maps the intimate and mobile ways in which privacy is sought out – disrupted or achieved – in domestic, material and public realms. It does so by following the paths to privacy and the personal belongings carried as they move through personal life. The article demonstrates how privacy is embodied and spatially, temporally, relationally and materially shaped. In doing so, the article argues that privacy comes to shift through everyday contexts and social relations with intimate materialities in mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mobility in the cultural sector is currently an important issue in government policy and public discussion, associated with perceptions of a collapse in numbers of working-class origin individuals becoming artists, actors, musicians and authors. The question of who works in creative occupations has also attracted significant sociological attention. To date, however, there have been no empirically grounded studies into the changing social composition of such occupations. This article uses the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study to show that, while those from more privileged social backgrounds have long dominated, there has been no change in the relative class mobility chances of gaining access to creative work. Instead, we must turn to the pattern of absolute mobility into this sector in order to understand claims that it is experiencing a 'mobility crisis'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relationship between the sociology of utopia and Black visions of liberation. Influential figures from Karl Mannheim to Ruth Levitas have effectively demonstrated the value of a utopian perspective for sociology. However, the African American tradition of utopianism has been largely overlooked in this literature. I argue that the Black standpoint forces a rethinking of the sociological understanding of utopia. More specifically, while most sociologists of utopia straightforwardly associate the desire for a better world with the future, the Black tradition proposes a more expansive understanding of utopia's temporality. Building on visions of new worlds advanced by WEB Du Bois and the movement for reparations for slavery, I suggest that Black utopia involves a glance backwards to the past, such that the image of a better future is accompanied by the memory of the catastrophe of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studying sociology can be empowering and transformative, fostering criticality and reflexivity, this capacity is not being sufficiently harnessed in school/college-based delivery in England. A large survey of sociology teachers revealed that they are required to teach outdated and sometimes discredited studies, which can reinforce rather than challenge stereotypes held by the privileged and which can be disempowering for those students who cannot recognise their own experiences. This article provides a unique insight into the ways that school/college curricula reinforce inequality and contributes to important debates within the sociology of education. Specifically, the article argues that the work being undertaken to decolonise the curriculum in universities, through challenging structural and discursive operations of power, should also inform the revision of school/college specifications. The lessons from this study can be usefully applied to the teaching of sociology beyond England and indeed to other subject disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions about the future, and futurelessness, have attracted wide-ranging attention in recent years. Our article explores what Sociology offers. We reflect on the apparent contradiction that the future was bracketed off from the discipline in its early history, yet also offers rich theoretical, methodological and empirical resources for futures research. We demonstrate this through an analysis of the contributions to this Special Issue, each of which draws on explicitly Sociological theories and methods to consider futures in a range of fields. Finally, we explore further developments necessary for a Sociology of the Future. We argue that Sociology can and should be more directly involved in claiming what futures might be, should be and in materialising these claims. This means moving beyond Sociology – as a distinct set of resources – towards expansive engagement with other future-making actors. This may challenge and change Sociology but may also be key to its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including manuscripts, sociology, and peer review process.

The article presents an interview with Professor Les Back talking about class and community driving the path into sociology. Topics include task of the academic practice of sociology being a kind of lay making the familiar strange; and objects to stories of globalisation, supply chains, manufacturing in the global South as well as colonialism.

At a time when nationalist sentiment is on the rise, this special issue takes stock of how sociology can contribute to understanding the past, present and future of nationalism. In contrast to declarations of 'the end of history', which was also meant to herald increasing integration due to a lowering of cultural and national barriers, nationalism never went away. The articles in this collection engage with the question of nationalism at a theoretical and empirical level and in different regional contexts, assessing how national boundaries are drawn and policed, how national identities are formed and the myriad political and everyday consequences of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making and consuming food are evident aspects in migrants' construction and reproduction of memory, identity and belonging. Food consumption can also enable migrants to make themselves at home abroad by reproducing aspects of their past and relating them to particular places in the present. This article draws from ethnographic work in Ecuadorian restaurants in Madrid to investigate the 'domestication' of space through their material culture. It examines the representation and use of these restaurants to unveil multiple ways of displaying belonging and reproducing degrees of domesticity. Enacting private routines, embodying familiarity through food and decorating backbars are instances that reveal how the material arrangements in migrant-run restaurants facilitate the construction of a sense of home. From a sociological perspective, this article reveals how the boundaries between private and public, as well as migrants' ethnicity and belonging, are constantly reshaped through material arrangements that operate as forms of domestication of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing inequalities have prompted research on the wealthiest groups and their cohesive practices and ideologies. This article suggests that emotional expression – how the members of the wealthy upper class feel about themselves and the rest of society – provides a way to examine their position in society. Drawing from interviews with business executives who belong to the richest 0.1% in Finland and to their society's power elites, I argue that just as low-income groups feel resentful towards more affluent groups, the wealthy also harbour resentment towards more disadvantaged groups. The wealthy executives create an emotionally laden self-justification – a deep story – in which they feel positively about themselves but assign negative feelings to other classes. In this narrative, the optimistic business elites thus become gloomy societal elites, who build empathy walls against the less advantaged groups even in Finland, one of the world's most equal countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at how sociology might regard the concept of 'character', both in terms of the way it is used in public discourse and in its own accounts of social life. In the former, the concept is likely to be regarded with suspicion, especially where it is used to explain individuals' life outcomes in a way that ignores social structures and depoliticizes inequalities. Such usages are to be found in political discourse on welfare and in the character education movement as a solution to problems of 'social mobility'. Yet if character refers to individuals' settled dispositions to act in certain ways, then it has some affinities with the Bourdieusian concept of habitus. The article argues both for developing the critique of ideological uses of the concept and for considering how it might be used in ways that do not misrepresent its explanatory and normative significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While accepting Banton's recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal challenges. Identifying a series of key measures in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 and the Welfare and Work Act of 2016, this article examines the challenges that have ensued, and the way that agency is revealed as both a site of disciplinary control and as a focus for contestation, pitting the purposive rationality of welfare reform against the practical reason that emerges from claimant experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law. The article proposes a conceptual framework drawing together sociologies of the everyday, necropolitics and slow violence in tracing how hierarchical conceptions of human worth impact on the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests that citizenship should be seen not as a status to be acquired, lost or refused by an individual. Rather it is an emergent and relational capacity produced and reproduced in everyday material interactions, across a spectrum of activities from work to lifestyle practices. We examine one example of such a material interaction: the engagements that young people have with sexualities education. To aid this endeavour, we apply a new materialist, relational framework that addresses the micropolitical interactions between humans and non-human materialities. Using data from two studies of sexualities education, we assess how the capacities produced during sexualities education interactions – such as a capacity to express specific sexual desires or to manage fertility proactively – contribute inter alia to young people's 'becoming-citizen'. Informed by this analysis, we argue that sociology may usefully apply a bottom–up model of citizenship as becoming, constituted materially from diverse engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including empirical sociology, social class, and intersectionality.

This article presents a new critical engagement with the concept of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), focusing on the rationale for grouping occupations and industries under this label. We show how the definition of 'creativity' used to demonstrate CCIs' economic performance remains contested and variable, particularly with regard to the inclusion of specific parts of the IT sector. In demonstrating the importance of IT to the economic narrative regarding CCIs, we then unfold a related critique, exploring patterns in cultural consumption within CCI occupations. We demonstrate how some CCI workers have distinctively high cultural consumption, others reflect their broader social class, and some, including IT workers, show lower than expected consumption. Overall, we question the coherence of the prevailing CCI category, particularly in government policy, and suggest a new mode of 'cultural' occupational analysis for the sociology of CCIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how healthcare professionals articulate the relationship between patient experience and ‘evidence’, creating hybrid forms of knowledge. We propose a Bakhtinian dialogical framework to theorise this process. Drawing on ethnographic work from patient involvement initiatives in England, we show how patient experiences are re-articulated by professionals who add their own intentions and accents in a dialogical process which incorporates diverse forms of knowledge and the conflicting demands of healthcare services. In this process, patient experiences become useful epistemic commodities, helping professionals to respond to workplace pressures by abstracting experiences from patients’ biographies, instrumentalising experiences and privileging ‘disembodied’ forms of involvement. Understanding knowledge as relational and hybrid helps move beyond the assumption that there is a clear dichotomy between ‘objective science’ and ‘subjective experience’. This article illuminates how new knowledge is produced when professionals engage with ‘lay’ patient knowledge, and helps inform the sociology of knowledge production more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital components of making sense of data. We nuance the argument that regimes of datafication, in which numbers, metrics and statistics dominate, are characterised by a renewed faith in objectivity and rationality, arguing that in datafied times, it is not only numbers but also the feeling of numbers that is important. We build on the sociology of (a) emotions and (b) the everyday to do this, and in so doing, we contribute to the development of a sociology of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nothing is a sociologically neglected terrain, comprising negatively defined phenomena, such as non-identification, non-participation and non-presence. Nevertheless, these symbolic social objects are created and managed through meaningful social interaction. Nothing is accomplished either by active commission (doing/being a non-something) or by passive omission (not-doing/not-being something). I explore these dichotomous forms through four dimensions of negative social space: non-identity; inactivity; absence; and silence. Paradoxically, nothing is always productive of something: other symbolic objects come into being through the apprehension of phantoms, imaginaries, replacements and alternatives, which generate further constitutive meanings. A sociological analysis illuminates these processes, revealing how much nothing matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen persistent tension between proponents of big data analytics, using new forms of digital data to make computational and statistical claims about ‘the social’, and many sociologists sceptical about the value of big data, its associated methods and claims to knowledge. We seek to move beyond this, taking inspiration from a mode of argumentation pursued by Piketty, Putnam and Wilkinson and Pickett that we label ‘symphonic social science’. This bears both striking similarities and significant differences to the big data paradigm and – as such – offers the potential to do big data analytics differently. This offers value to those already working with big data – for whom the difficulties of making useful and sustainable claims about the social are increasingly apparent – and to sociologists, offering a mode of practice that might shape big data analytics for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case for a sociological engagement with kindness. Although virtually ignored by sociologists, we tend to know kindness when we see it and to feel its absence keenly. We suggest there are at least four features of ‘ordinary’ kindness which render it sociologically relevant: its infrastructural quality; its unobligated character; its micro or inter-personal focus and its atmospheric potential. This latter quality is not the ‘maelstrom of affect’ associated with urban living but can subtly alter how we feel and what we do. We illustrate these features through a study of everyday help and support. In doing so, we argue that – as much as Simmel’s blasé outlook – small acts of kindness are part of how we can understand city living and that, despite the cultural trope of randomness, a sociologically adequate account of kindness needs to recognise the ways in which it is socially embedded and differentiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies Norbert Elias’s ‘processual-relational approach’ to an empirical case: the influential Leicester Department of Sociology between 1954 and 1982. Based on 42 qualitative interviews and extensive archival materials, we identify two phases: the early phase of cohesion is characterised by a strong sense of purpose and a growing influence on British sociology. The second phase is characterised by social and intellectual fragmentation. In explaining this reversal, we argue that a critical juncture of youth rebellion around 1968 provided the portents of an anti-authoritarian civilisational trend, which increasingly put strains on the established power nexus: the autocratic leadership model embodied by the department’s inspirational leader, Ilya Neustadt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this process, existing research highlights the significance of body work, practical techniques and the senses to these pedagogic processes. What has yet to be explicated adequately, however, is the embodied importance of cognition to this incorporation of culture. In what follows, I address this lacuna by building on John Dewey’s writings in proposing an approach to body pedagogics sympathetic to the prioritization of physical experience but that recognizes the distinctive properties and capacities of thought and reflexivity in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including sociology and social class, self-identity, and intersectionality.

Following recent calls for a more self-aware and historically sensitive sociology this article reflects on the concept of deindustrialisation and industrial change in this spirit. Using EP Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class and his examination of industrialising culture with its stress on experience, the article asks how these insights might be of value in understanding contemporary processes of deindustrialisation and work. Drawing on a range of sociological, cultural and literary studies it conceptualises the differences and similarities between two historic moments of industrial change and loss. In particular it draws on the literary concept of the 'half-life of deindustrialisation' to explore these periods. The article has important implications for how we think about contemporary and historical industrial decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the need for imagining forms of sociological thinking and doing beyond the univocity of disciplinary knowledge. In order to do so, we demonstrate how connections between different ‘sensory worlds’ involve equivocal understandings about what the ‘social’ entails. We begin by considering current anthropological reflections on the equivocal character of social relations as well as the equivocal ways in which western sociology has conceptualized the ‘social’. In order to visualize how ‘equivocal connections’ between different sensory worlds emerge, we build on Mapuche indigenous understandings about how different practices open up different sensory worlds. Through the examination of one of the hunger strikes that has taken place in the conflict between Mapuche people and the Chilean state, we show how such equivocal connections entail ontological, rather than epistemological, differences. Both as ethical and epistemological imperative, these differences must be actively demonstrated in order to reinvigorate the sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Akiwowo propounded the Asuwada Theory of Sociation in the 1980s as a contextual episteme to explain African social experience. The theory particularly attempts an indigenous postulation to social interactions among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular. Its concepts attempt to emphasise contextual values of social beings who would contribute to social survival and community integration and development. This theory postulates that among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular, the need to associate or co-exist by internalising and rightly exhibiting socially approved values of community survival and development, is integral to local social structure, as failure to co-exist potentially endangers the community. A deviant who defaults in sociating values is deemed a bad person (omoburuku), while the one who sociates is the good person (omoluabi). This theoretical postulation contrasts western social science theories (especially sociological Structuralist (macro) and Social Action (micro) theories), which rather emphasise rationality and individualism (at varied levels depending on the theory). Western social science ethnocentrically depicts African communal and kin ways of life as primitive and antithetical to development. Western social science theories have remained dominant and hegemonic over the years while Akiwowo’s theory is largely unpopular even in Nigerian social science curricula in spite of its potential for providing contextual interpretations for indigenous ways of life that are still very much extant despite dominant western modernity. This article examines the Asuwada Theory within the context of globalised social sciences and the complicated and multifaceted glocal challenges confronting the adoption of the Akiwowo’s epistemic intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By developing a sustained engagement with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s work, as well as establishing possible connections with what has been termed the ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology, in this article I argue that in order for sociology to become exposed to the deeply transformative potential of non-Eurocentric thinking, it needs to cultivate a decolonial imagination that may enable it to move beyond epistemology, and to recognise that there is no social and cognitive justice without existential justice, no politics of knowledge without a politics of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the emerging field of creative industry studies, for reasons of its inter-disciplinary origins, has tended to sidestep questions of method. Sociology can play a role in rectifying this deficit for three reasons; first, the long-standing attention to qualitative, interview and observation-based research is useful, especially for scholars investigating the experience of work and labour in the creative sector, second because recent sociological attention to the whole terrain of big data has repercussions even for small-scale studies such as the one outlined here, and third because well-known sociological studies of creative professionals offer value and insight into the conduct of re-differentiated cultural sectors, in this case fashion design. By providing details of a funded study of this sector in three cities (London, Berlin and Milan), the article also proposes a utilising of the recent role of the so-called entrepreneurial university as creative hub, so as to develop a more radical idea of ‘knowledge transfer’. In addition, the article encourages a two-way exchange between sociology and creative industry studies to develop a better understanding of cultural goods, items and works of art. Such a focus on the material object or outcome of creative practice also opens up the possibility for a more collaborative exchange with the cultural producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this reflective piece I use Mills as a starting point for exploring the intersections between my own biography and some of the main trends in sociology since the journal Sociology was published 50 years ago. The Millsean motif of intertwined ‘personal troubles’ and ‘developments of the epoch’ can usefully be used to examine individual experiences of change and transformation in the discipline and consider key trends such as the ‘flight’ of the discipline and the push towards interdisciplinarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the journal Sociology, four e-special issues have been produced to explore specific themes across the journal’s history. In this e-special, we examine how social class has been discussed during the early years of the journal, 1967–1979. Based on our selection of 10 past articles, and two more recent articles, we examine two broad themes. First, we consider how social class has been conceptualised, paying particular attention to the notion of embourgeoisement. Second, we turn to methodological considerations and discuss how approaches to researching class have evolved over time. This e-special provides not only an opportunity to celebrate the Sociology back catalogue but also to re-appraise some of the classic contributions from the first decade of the journal’s history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that the emerging field of the sociology of naming should recognize the fundamental importance of bodies in the range of social practices through which individuals come to have, and to be identified by, names. I introduce the concept of ‘embodied named identity’ to describe the outcome of identificatory practices of naming fundamentally orientated around and rooted in the body. I argue that the concept addresses the neglect of the body within the sociology of names and the neglect of naming within both the sociology of identity and in the sociology of the body. In my elaboration of the value of the concept of embodied named identity for enhancing sociological understanding, I focus on evidence on naming practices in relation to sexed and gendered bodies, racialized and ethnic bodies, bodies, nicknames and characterization, ‘nameless’ bodies and ‘body-less’ names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of relationality has recently found widespread favour in British sociology, particularly in the emergent sub-field of the sociology of personal life, which is characterized by its attachment to the concept. However, this ‘relational turn’ is under-theorized and pays little attention to the substantial history of relational thinking across the human sciences. This article argues that the notion of relationality in the sociology of personal life might be strengthened by an exploration of the conceptualization of the relational person and relational processes offered by three bodies of literature: the process-oriented thinking of American pragmatism, specifically of Mead and Emirbayer; the figurational sociology of Elias; and psychoanalysis, particularly the object relations tradition, contemporary relational psychoanalysis, and Ettinger’s notion of transubjectivity. The article attends particularly to the processes involved in the individuality, agentic reflexivity and affective dimensions of the relational person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the forms and impact of violence against people identifying as members of alternative subcultures. It draws upon the findings from interviews and focus groups undertaken with over 60 participants from a range of alternative subcultural backgrounds, conducted as part of a broader two-year study of many different strands of targeted hostility. The article presents evidence to show that ‘alternatives’ are subjected to a wide range of violent and intimidatory behaviour, from ‘everyday’ abuse such as verbal insults through to more extreme acts of brutality. This can affect their physical and mental health, causing them to change the way they conduct their routine activities. However, the article suggests that some of this victimisation forms part of ongoing conflict with a group that participants describe as ‘chavs’, that has hitherto been unacknowledged. This ‘little war’ is characterised by mutual hostility and antipathy flavoured by class antagonism that can escalate into violent confrontation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how people involved in the zine subculture in the UK negotiate a sense of subcultural belonging through their participation at zinefests – radical marketplaces that facilitate the exchange of independently produced, not-for-profit media known as ‘zines’. The primary contention of the article is that contemporary subcultural networks are implicit in producing, via a multiplicity of entrance points, a ‘subcultural subject’ who negotiates both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ subjectivities at various times. This point is exemplified throughout the article through the exploration of qualitative data collected via interviews and ethnographic work at zinefests between October 2009 and July 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to the critical reception of the arguments made about social class in Savage et al. (2013). It emphasises the need to disentangle different strands of debate so as not to conflate four separate issues: (a) the value of the seven class model proposed; (b) the potential of the large web survey – the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) for future research; (c) the value of Bourdieusian perspectives for re-energising class analysis; and (d) the academic and public reception to the GBCS itself. We argue that, in order to do justice to the full potential of the GBCS, we need a concept of class which does not reduce it to a technical measure of a single variable and which recognises how multiple axes of inequality can crystallise as social classes. Whilst recognising the limitations of what we are able to claim on the basis of the GBCS, we argue that the seven classes defined in Savage et al. (2013) have sociological resonance in pointing to the need to move away from a focus on class boundaries at the middle reaches of the class structure towards an analysis of the power of elite formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social change and large-scale transformations are as important to everyday life sociology as to macro sociology approaches. South Africa has been a ‘hotspot’ of change with a number of such transitions occurring in a condensed time-period, in particular regarding ‘race’ matters. A large South African family collection, concerning the Forbes family, is used to explore how the processes of change regarding the racial order can be analysed within an everyday sociology framework, focusing on the period 1850 to 1930. A range of documents throwing light on ‘the space of the day’, ‘the world and the word’ and other aspects of everyday experience are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to the journal's book review symposium on his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity." Topics include his reactions to how reviewers described the book as ideological, his denial of such ideological allegations by stating that his arguments are based on empirical data, and a reference to the preface of his book wherein he mentions the diverse datasets he used to show historical declines in violence.

The article highlights two contrasting ways in which social theorists have been trying to define the ontological boundaries of sociology since the early days of the discipline. Some (e.g. Durkheim, Weber, and critical realists) have attempted to demarcate social reality as a causally autonomous and qualitatively distinct realm in a segmented/stratified universe. Others (e.g. Tarde, Spencer, Luhmann, sociobiologists, and actor-network theorists) have postulated a more open (or flat) ontological space and blurred such demarcations by either rejecting the causal autonomy of sociological phenomena, or their qualitative distinctiveness, or both. So far, there has been little convergence between these two orientations since according to the former, the opening of the boundaries is likely to give way to reductionist conceptions of society, whereas the latter tends to associate rigid boundaries with essentialism. Through a close examination of these opposing orientations, the article aims to shed light on current ontological dilemmas of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deceit occupies a significant role in historical conceptualizations of social order, but dominant approaches to the subject are limited by the normative assumptions and conceptions of agency and structure on which they rest. This article suggests that renewed sociological engagement with deceit is overdue and can illuminate the ‘situational logics of opportunity’ within modernity (Archer, 2010). Focusing on the contemporary era, and building upon Simmel’s argument that individuals lead a ‘doubled existence’, within and outside social forms, we view deceit as neither a personal trait nor an effect of social structures. Instead, it emerges through, and assumes contrasting meanings as a consequence of, people’s interested and strategic engagements with the social world. Developing this theoretical analysis substantively, we then focus on several examples of how deceit is used to subvert or reaffirm boundaries between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ groups, including those emergent from sociology’s own ‘doubled existence’ relative to modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for global and provincialized sociologies have emerged in the last decade as thoughtful projects in contemporary sociology. In this article, I criticize the rhetorical nature and epistemic endogamy of some of those calls through case studies of sociologies in Mexico and their institutional and epistemic complexity. Avoiding reductionisms, I will characterize sociologies in Mexico as both central (mainly Westernized) and (semi)peripheral. From a critical stance, I will argue that the latter are constructed upon teleological, prescriptive and pragmatic-theory logics and constitute epistemologically legitimate (professional) sociologies, given their logics’ internal cognitive affinity and the consistency these logics present in relation to external ideological structures and socio-political discourses. I will then make explicit some of the theoretical and disciplinary challenges these overlooked professional sociologies bring to the fore. I conclude by suggesting a postcolonial theoretical-methodological strategy to address such challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mainstream British sociology has curiously neglected happiness studies despite growing interest in wellbeing in recent years. Sociologists often view happiness as a problematic, subjective phenomenon, linked to problems of modernity such as consumerism, alienation and anomie. This construction of ‘happiness as a problem’ has a long history from Marx and Durkheim to contemporary writers such as Ahmed and Furedi. Using qualitative interview data, I illustrate how lay accounts of happiness suggest it is experienced in far more ‘social’ ways than these traditional subjective constructions. We should therefore be wary of using crude representations of happiness as vehicles for our traditional depictions of modernity. Such ‘thin’ accounts of happiness have inhibited a serious sociological engagement with the things that really matter to ordinary people, such as our efforts to balance suffering and flourishing in our daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Changing attitudes towards animals in modern industrialised societies has triggered new lines of scholarly enquiry. The emergence of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) is part of the turn towards animals within the social sciences. Although sociology is a relative newcomer to multispecies scholarship, more than three decades ago a sociologist anticipated that the discipline might benefit from attending to the ‘zoological connection’ (Bryant, 1979). Bringing to the fore what usually remains in the shadowy background, i.e. our symbolic and material relations with nonhuman animals, has started to unearth underexplored areas of social life. This is a noteworthy retrieval, because it reminds us of the multifaceted and entangled nature of interspecies interfaces, networks and encounters. This article suggests that seeing life through a multispecies lens not only allows scholars in cognate and non-cognate disciplines an opportunity to engage in innovative scholarship, it also lays the groundwork to animalise the sociological imagination and sociologise HAS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While there has been much discussion in recent decades on the nature of social capital and its importance in online interactions, it is my contention that these discussions have been dominated by the American Communitarian tradition. In this article, I begin with an overview of American Communitarianism to identify the key elements therein that are found in contemporary theories of social capital. Following this, I expose some of the weaknesses of this tradition and apply Bourdieu’s distinctive theoretical framework to online interactions to demonstrate the fecundity of Bourdieu’s sociological perspective when applied to contemporary online interactions. To do this, I examine interactions online that involve ‘internet memes’, as digital inhabitants themselves colloquially define them. It is my contention that an agonistic model, rather than a communitarian one, best describes the online interactions of digital inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]