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This article extends existing sociological scholarship on doing and displaying family by developing the concept of documenting families. We suggest that documenting is conceptually rich insofar as it showcases the relationship, and tensions, between institutional practices and individual experiences of family display. Drawing on our research with men who became parents without partners, we argue that the process of documenting family is made especially evident in studies of what Finch originally referred to as 'non-conventional' family relationships. We explain that documenting sheds light not only on the official and unofficial means through which families are recognised on paper, but also on family practices as work – in this case paper-work – that involves negotiation between different social actors who are generally unequal in terms of their authority and agency to impose situational meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersectionality scholarship has yet to systematically recognize the importance of citizenship status for the mutual shaping of inequalities. In this article, we bring attention to the combined structuring force of criminal law and citizenship status (and the related concepts of 'illegal' or 'irregular' status) in intersecting with other categories of social disadvantage, such as those created by racialization, class, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with women in prisons for 'foreign nationals' and health clinics for 'undocumented' migrants in Norway and Denmark, this article shows how citizenship status has a central role in the co-constitution of gendered, classed and racialized social disadvantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Despite the decolonial turn among sociologists, we have yet to engage a vast amount of thought produced by anti-colonial movements. The circumvention of much of this thought indexes overly restrictive understandings of what constitutes social theory, and I diagnose three ways in which this plays out. Anti-colonial movement texts provide striking demonstrations of this limitation, and of what is lost as a result. Through a close study of a banned 1970s pamphlet from Pakistan, I show that critically deepening the decolonial project through an engagement with movement texts raises ethical questions about the academy's relationship to political struggle and demands new methodologies of archival retrieval that recognise the scattered, fragmented condition of texts subject to colonial violence. If addressed, southern movement texts reveal counter-infrastructures of knowledge production replete with counter-political vocabularies that challenge homogenising academic definitions of the Global South and enrich our theories of decolonial praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists the non-board expert referees who reviewed papers of the periodical including Pamela Abbott of University of Aberdeen, Necla Acik of University of Manchester, and Laura Adler of Harvard University.

Understanding everyday social practices is challenging as many are mundane and taken for granted and therefore difficult to articulate or recall. This paper reflects on the challenges encountered in a qualitative study underpinned by current theories of practice that incorporated visual methods. Using this approach meant everyone in a sample of 20 household cases, from children through to adults in their 80s, could show and tell their own stories about domestic kitchen practices. Households co-produced visual data with the research team through kitchen tours, photography, diaries/scrapbooks, informal interviews and recording video footage. The visual data complemented and elaborated on the non-visual data and contradictions could be thoroughly interrogated. A significant challenge was handling the substantial insight revealed about a household through visual methods, in terms of household anonymity. The paper reflects on the challenges of a visual approach and the contribution it can make in an applied sociological study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While grounded theory involves many iterations between concept-building and concept-testing, the overall direction of analysis proceeds from loosely related concepts to tightly interrelated theoretical systems. Such a ‘bottom-up’ logic of analysis may lead to a number of problems, for example descriptiveness or missing out on large-scale general patterns. This paper proposes to alleviate these problems by adopting a ‘top-down’ methodological strategy. Such a strategy begins from highlighting the most general patterns in the data. With each step of analysis the patterns are gradually broken down into more specific models. Through this process the gap between the generality of concepts and the specificity of data is reduced, eventually resulting in a middle-range theory. The historical narrative of the construction of a Soviet Estonian personal computer, Juku, is used to demonstrate the strategy in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional theories of 'local area effects' hypothesise that local area differences in organisational resources are an important feature of inequality in individuals' residential environments. However, while the organisational dimension of local areas has been identified as an important research priority within urban sociology, empirical work remains limited, with charitable organisations particularly under-researched. Therefore, a key question remains unanswered: why do charities in more deprived local areas have higher dissolution rates, reinforcing a lower prevalence of charities compared with less deprived areas? This article focuses on this research problem. It shows that volunteer leadership succession is less prominent in more deprived local areas, and that this more limited leadership succession helps explain why charities in more deprived areas experience higher dissolution rates. The results promote understanding of a mechanism underlying local area differences in organisational dynamics that lead to persistent differences in institutional resources between more and less deprived local areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, based on ethnographic research conducted in Perth, Western Australia and Madrid, Spain, we consider how community is understood and enacted for Russian-speaking migrants and its role in cultural (re)production. Studies often overlook the important role of struggle, contestation and power relations in everyday practices of community making. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, we describe the Russian-speaking migrant community as a structured social space in which community leaders and migrant institutions compete for the right to represent the community. As a result of power differentials, contested ideas about what Russian-speaking culture is and how it should be transmitted, maintained and produced are established, (re)produced and revised. The community is perceived by its own members as disunited and/or consisting of members with whom migrants do not want to identify, forming a 'community of unbelonging'. [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]

This article analyses the relationship between law and class formation through the case of migrant care and domestic work, and puts sociological class theory into conversation with critical migration research. It contributes to class theory by analysing how law helps produce class relations in the Finnish context. The Finnish state channels migrants into cleaning and domestic work through policy measures, and migration law ties them to the reproductive sector, making law a central social relation that defines migrants' relation to production. The analysis draws on interviews with migrant care and domestic workers (N = 30) holding temporary work permits and examines their structural and affective descriptions of a position restricted by law. The article argues that the way migrant domestic work is formalised in the legislation produces a class relation for migrants, in which they lack full ownership over their labour power. The findings demonstrate how migrant domestic workers express gratitude for their employment despite experiencing it as devalued, indicating labour as repayment of the 'gift' of the residence permit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the sociology of relationships by exploring the moral imperatives that shaped perceptions and negotiations of family life during lockdowns in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified dominant discourses from an online qualitative story completion task and situate these in relation to emerging literature on the impact of pandemic-related restrictions on domestic relationships, gender relations, and labour division. We argue that discourses of family connection, clean and tidy homes, and the commodity of time operated as moral imperatives. These imperatives simultaneously offered opportunities for enrichment and agency, as well as operating as unobtainable benchmarks that constrained people's sense of wellbeing. In this analysis we explore how COVID-19 lockdown stories offer new ways of understanding the interplay between displaying and doing 'family life' where gender and labour relations are performed, reinforced and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses relationships between racism and antisemitism. It focuses on three major contestations that have taken place during the post-Second World War era(s) regarding the ways racism, antisemitism and the relationships between them should be analysed. The first examines the different academic disciplinary approaches from which racism and antisemitism need to be studied. The second concerns the relationship between antisemitism, racism and modernity, introducing the notion of 'new antisemitism', which has become entangled in this contestation. The third examines how understanding racism and antisemitism relates to the theory and politics of intersectionality. The article argues against exclusionary constructions of racism resulting from different forms of identity politics. It calls for an inclusive definition of racism in which vernacular and specific forms of racism can be contextualised and analysed within an encompassing de-centred non-Eurocentric definition of racism. Within such an analytical framework, antisemitism should be seen as a form of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how visions of the future were constructed by eight adolescent girls graduating from secondary school under a COVID-19 lockdown in Germany. Employing grounded theory method to analyse interview data, it theorises how the girls under lockdown constructed visions of their future along space and time in terms of traffic mobility, nature and embodied reproduction. The findings indicate that the girls creatively used topic-dependent constructions of space and time to generate hope and control and thereby maintained their agency and an adolescent self-identity for their anticipated futures during the lockdown-present. These findings are then integrated into a theoretical model that introduces the strategy of 'morphing temporality' to describe how the girls constructed hope and control and maintained agency and an adolescent self-identity despite the sudden spatial lockdown constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many parts of the world, individuals and groups have managed significant disruptions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article draws on data collected through interviews with 40 Australia-based participants regarding their day-to-day routines and technological engagement as they navigated mobility restrictions intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease. We use insights from Science and Technology Studies to shed light on how their technosocial relations enabled and regulated participants' sociality while informing their desires for normalcy. Findings highlight perspectives and practices that diverge from popular framings of the pandemic as giving rise to a 'new normal'. Instead, our analysis shows how human and non-human actors became inextricably linked in the management of everyday disruptions, illustrating forms of mundane governance. We conclude by reflecting on how Science and Technology Studies-informed approaches to the mundane glean important insight for the sociological study of the pandemic specifically and of everyday life generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages Göran Therborn's conceptualisation of existential inequality to explore lived experiences of loneliness in later life. Existential inequality refers to unequal social distribution of personhood, from dignity to autonomy. We argue sociological approaches, like inequality frameworks, are critical to grasp the social nature of loneliness – often missing in related literature. Investigating how people perceive and respond to their loneliness provides a comprehensive understanding of the links between personal/agentic and social/structural dimensions. We apply the idea of existential inequality to two case studies with older people (aged 65+) reporting prolonged loneliness: one encompassing ethnographic data and interviews with care home residents, and a second focusing on diaries produced by older people living alone. Employing existential inequality to frame how older people define, experience and manage loneliness highlights an assemblage of stigmas and marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of diversity and widening participation initiatives, access to elite professions for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds remains a troublingly persistent issue. Degree apprenticeships present an alternative to the traditional university pathway and an opportunity to increase social mobility into professional occupations. Yet, uptake of this pathway has so far been from more advantaged individuals. This article explores the dispositions of key stakeholders towards alternative pathways. It asks whether professional apprenticeships are perceived as legitimate and, if not, what are the likely consequences? Using the solicitors' profession in England as a pertinent case, interviews with 23 participants on the degree apprenticeship and university pathways were asked about their social and educational backgrounds, exploring the influences on their career and pathway decision making. The analysis demonstrates differing perceptions of risk and legitimacy among those from different social and educational backgrounds, with implications for equity, inequality and social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine how belonging takes place within lives shaped by the hostile milieu of UK immigration policies and politics, by focusing on the everyday experiences of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage, I suggest an understanding of belonging as a rhizomatic assemblage, comprising the interactions and relations of diverse forces and flows. Based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with unaccompanied young people and the professionals who care for or work with them, I conclude that belonging is reconfigured in-between relations, always incomplete and in transition. I argue that belonging is characterised by inconsistencies and ruptures and made possible by the 'micro-politics' of those unaccompanied young people encounter in their everyday lives. I contribute to the literature by conceptualising the sociological notion of belonging in a novel way and exposing its key components and nature formed under precarious conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Brexit-driven remaking of some EU families into mixed-status families. Drawing on original research conducted in 2021–2022 with British, EU/EEA and non-EU/EEA citizens living in the UK or the EU/EEA, it shows how families whose members have previously enjoyed equal rights to freedom of movement across the EU/EEA variously negotiate the consequences of Brexit on their lives. Central to our analysis is the interplay between hardening borders and the stickiness of family relations, and its effects on families' migration and settlement projects. The article brings to the fore these emerging entanglements offering a much-needed relational analysis of the impact of Brexit on the directly affected populations, while contributing more widely to expanding the existing scholarship on mixed-status families, by attending to the peculiar ways in which families whose members previously enjoyed equal status under EU law have experienced their transformation into subjects with unequal rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased inequalities around the globe have led social researchers to invent innovative methodologies to study how people subjectively perceive inequality and imagine society. This article presents the development of an arts-informed method, 'drawing of society', applied to a multi-sited ethnography of everyday inequalities in two major post-industrial cities of Russia. It contributes to the debate on lay perceptions of social structure by looking at moral and symbolic signifiers of inequality. Building on multi-sensory data, I argue that workers and professionals tend to imagine Russian society as divided between a small group of the rich and a large group of the poor and as consisting of social classes. Ordinary people self-identify with the poor and perceive their position as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Depending on their lived experiences, research participants express their sense of inequality through the narrative strategies of compliance, inversion and subversion of power hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the life-stories and identity narratives of Turks of Western Thrace (Greece) focusing on the role of the Turkish–Greek border and its changing permeability. It suggests that people who have strong attachments to both sides of a national border experience spatial liminality and the border is a place of passage between not only territories, but also lived identities. For young Turks of Western Thrace, travelling to Turkey to work or study is an established strategy that is intertwined with major life events. Drawing on ride-along interviews and focusing on five participants, who travelled to Turkey during the Cyprus crisis, the article identifies the disciplinary power of bordering on identities and life-stories. By examining how different individuals dealt with this power, and how their circumstances affected the outcomes, it explores the tensions between agency and structure, state power and resistance, and categorisation and liminality during life-planning and identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public houses have long served an important social role in the United Kingdom, yet in recent decades the conditions under which they operate have changed dramatically. While research has examined adaptations in the pub sector, there is little analysis of how this relates to social change as experienced in the lives of individuals and communities. Pubs are therefore a useful topic of sociological inquiry. Using focus groups data, this article examines how people experience the changing form and function of pubs reveals insights into perceptions of social change. Findings show that participants were aware of how pub culture has changed over recent decades and that this was linked to perceptions of wider social and cultural changes in society. Talking about pub going was a means to express dynamic feelings of belonging and attachment, particularly where they arise at the intersection of personal life changes and wider social transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the perspectives of student teachers from working class backgrounds about not becoming middle class. Little attention has been paid to conceptualisations of social class in teaching. In the context of drives internationally to diversify teaching populations, research is needed about the experiences of student teachers from working class backgrounds in their upwardly mobile trajectories. This article draws on a constructivist grounded theory study about the social class identities of 21 student teachers from working class backgrounds as part of a wider teacher diversity project in Ireland. Distinguishing between class 'mentality' and materiality, participants emphasised that one could not change class completely, rejected the middle classness of a teacher's social status and positioned working class 'mentality' as morally superior. Those from working class backgrounds do not simply relinquish aspects of their identity through upward social mobility, suggesting that habitus may not always be divided upon traversing class boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw attention to the border and border governance as key mechanisms of class and 'race-making' in the context of an increasingly hostile immigration environment. Focusing on the life story narratives of migrants experiencing homelessness, we extend the reach of analysis beyond the experiences of asylum seekers to gain a stronger understanding of migrant experiences more broadly. In our analysis, we reveal the temporal continuum of suffering endured, ranging from the 'slow violence' of the everyday, rooted in precarity and restricted access to the labour market and support services, to moments of rupture where there is a swift decline in circumstances, leading to homelessness. When, at last, the tempo of suffering slows again, these individuals are increasingly excluded from meaningful calendars of activity as they spend their time waiting, often in vain, for an outcome of a Home Office application or for the possibility of some longer-term accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly hostile immigration policies in the UK produce insecure immigration statuses and exclusion from public services and mainstream welfare benefits. Little is known about how this precaritization affects racially minoritized mothers with insecure immigration statuses and 'no recourse to public funds'. The ethnographic study on which this article is based explored the impact of hostile policies on mothering, and found that precaritization increases the significance of mothers' informal support networks, including friendships. I show how hostile policies constrain mothers' friendship practices, shaping access to support. I argue that while mothers share diverse forms of support through their everyday friendship practices, they have to navigate dialectical tensions (contradictions) that play out in ways specific to their precarious legal and financial positioning. Applying theories of friendship and relational dialectics, I highlight the importance of safe, sociable spaces and sustained 'friendship work' to navigate tensions and nurture friendships as sites of support. [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]

This article contributes to the debate on individualised and reflexive processes taking place in contemporary cultural work by considering Italian theatre actors’ experiences. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, the analysis focuses on work as the affective and reflexive site where subjectivities are formed. Performing artists display an embodied reflexive stance in which disciplinary practices and self-care instances are configured as both dispositives of an entrepreneurial ethos of work and as reflexive self-affirmative processes. Recognizing the embodied and emotional experiences that tie theatre actors to their professional activities, the paper considers the reflexive circularity that takes place between subjective meanings, affects and embedded experiences of work. Within this ongoing interpretive circle, cultural work emerges as positioned beyond traditional boundaries of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological studies of sustainable transformation have highlighted the relevance of 'unequal' and 'uneven' transformation dynamics. We argue that a practice-based approach provides far more insight into such unequal dynamics than currently recognized. We re-interpret the political concepts of agonism, antagonism and historic bloc that Gramsci used to analyse domination in order to theorize practice constellations and dynamics that are responsible for the perpetuation of unsustainable practices and the suppression of sustainable ones. Based on empirical findings, we also expand his vocabulary by introducing the concept of synergy. Using the example of urban cycling in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, we propose a Gramscian-inspired account of power and domination in practices as a way of understanding inequality in transformation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the fragmentation of work time influences subjective time pressure, and how this relationship varies across gender and parenthood status. This is an important question that has been neglected by previous studies. Using the latest UK time-use data (N = 620) from 2020 to 2021 and Ordinary Least Squares regressions, the study finds that work time fragmentation generally predicts more subjective time pressure. Specifically, work time fragmentation is found to increase subjective time pressure more among women without children than mothers. However, this effect is inverted among men, as the fragmentation of work time predicts more subjective time pressure among fathers but not among men without children. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of the adverse consequences of 'role switching' and 'work schedule instability' and their interaction with gender and parenthood. Accordingly, future research should consider work time fragmentation as a vital indicator of job and life quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic drug markets enable calculative, impersonal trade between faceless strangers, but also intimate interaction between pseudonymous users. In this space, do people treat banned drugs as ordinary consumer products that can be purchased from anyone? Or do drug-takers frame their consumption as a counter-cultural activity? To answer these questions, I use qualitative and computational research methods to analyse 3788 electronically published consumer reports of cannabis and psychedelic drugs from the period 2011–2017. I find that report writers emphasise product quality, customer service and transaction value, and devote less attention to the social and political sides of drug-taking. Discussions about legality, morality and counter-cultural ideas are completely absent from the texts, even in psychedelic reports, which detail profound effects. These findings suggest that drug e-commerce is primarily a normalising force, and that widening access to banned drugs is unlikely to disseminate counter-cultural perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between knowledge hierarchies and gender stratification in research funding. Through a mixed-methods study combining data on 5460 funded and unfunded social science applications submitted to a research council in Western Europe, and nine interviews with current and former council members, we explore how applicants' disciplinary, thematic and methodological orientations intersect with gender to shape funding opportunities. Descriptive analysis indicates that women's proposals are underfunded, with a relative gender difference of around 20%. Using computational text analysis and mediation analysis, we approximate that around one-third of this disparity may be attributed to gender differences in disciplinary focus, thematic specialisations and methodologies. The interviews with council members allow us to make sense of these disparities and expose the disciplinary hierarchies and power struggles at play in the council, sometimes resulting in a devaluation of qualitative methods and, more broadly, interpretive, descriptive and exploratory approaches in proposal assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises whether organisational commitments impact the representation of ethnic minorities in the university workforce. In doing so, it considers the institutional context and the broader restructuring of universities' personnel. The analysis is based on a longitudinal dataset of 120 universities, including university-level indicators of organisational commitments, institutional characteristics and ethnic minority staff numbers. The findings reveal that while on average, universities that are members of the Race Equality Charter exhibit higher shares of minority ethnic staff in higher-level contracts compared with those universities that are not members, joining the charter does not make a university more inclusive. Importantly, the share of minority ethnic staff is substantially lower in elite universities compared with all other universities, which indicates tensions between inclusion and university reputation. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to sociological institutionalist and organisational theories, and to higher education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In political and social scientific discourses, the link between right-wing political orientation and anti-immigrant sentiment is often presented as a universal social fact. Based on a systematic examination of the association between left–right political orientation and attitudes towards migrants, the article demonstrates a clear inconsistency in the strength and direction of this presumed association in postsocialist European countries. We provide two analytical explanations for this inconsistency. The first challenges the western-centric idea that people leaning towards the political right tend to hold conservative views that shape their tendency to express anti-immigrant sentiment. The second explanation pertains to the limited relevance of the left–right political orientation scale for postsocialist subjects, making it difficult to attribute anti-immigrant sentiment to specific political orientations. In conclusion, we discuss specific social identities of the holders of hostile attitudes towards outsiders in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe, which western-centric analytical models do not capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the cultural perceptions and the common sense held by Finnish mutual fund managers on the very wealthy and the rich in times of growing inequalities and increased wealth accumulation at the top. By studying the financial intermediaries on the shop-floor level, who embody the promises of popular finance, the article describes how fund managers working for the small investors make sense of the inequalities caused by financialization. In the research interviews analysed in the article, the mutual fund managers perceive the rich as a necessary and salutary part of the contemporary economy, whose function is to be and behave better than the financialized markets. This common sense concerning the rich helps to legitimize increasing wealth accumulation at the top, so that the fund managers' perceptions of the rich embody an ideological coalition between the working financiers and the super-rich rentiers, a coalition that contrasts starkly with the promises of popular finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a 'bordering scape', and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women's reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although prior studies have examined the impact of smartphone use on sleep and there is a growing interest in the interface between mobile phones and society, researchers know little about how and why people use mobile phones before bedtime and in bed. The current research explores this question by drawing on data from sleep diaries and in-depth interviews with 66 Israelis. The results show that the human–mobile phone sleep assemblage generates agentic capacities that allow individuals to engage in a digitally enabled form of what I call sleepful sociality – a sociality marked by sleep. Through the use of mobile phones, individuals create, maintain and/or detach from social relations and fulfil social obligations near bedtime and during sleep, while also trying to facilitate and protect their own and their bed partner's sleep. These findings enhance the understanding of how technology is enmeshed with sociality and creates new ways of being social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of whether attending a private school affects voting behaviour and political attitudes in adulthood in Britain. The analysis is based upon the British Cohort Study, a nationally representative cohort of children born in one week in April 1970. The 'effect' of attending a private school on the tendency to vote Conservative in four consecutive General Elections, and on the expression of conservative attitudes in mid-life is assessed using path analysis. The model includes multiple indicators for a range of antecedents: social origins at birth, cultural and material capital, academic achievements and early social class destination. Once these antecedents are included in the model, for both men and women a direct positive relationship remains between attending private school and voting Conservative and holding right-leaning attitudes. The main significance of these findings follows from the high proportion of private school alumni in influential positions in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship studying the impact of race-based prejudice has emphasized its rampant persistence throughout all aspects of modern society, including the world of sports. Prior research from American leagues has shown that even referees, trained officials intended to enact neutral judgements, are subject to bias against Black and dark-skinned players. To extend these studies and inform policies aimed at combating racial bias in public spaces more broadly, we report results from a unique dataset of over 6500 player-year observations from the Italian Serie A to examine whether these biases persist in European football. Our results show that darker-skinned players receive more foul calls and more cards than lighter-skinned players, controlling for a range of potential confounders and productivity-relevant mediators. By exploiting an absence of fans induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we also present preliminary evidence that fans may play a key role in inducing poor calls against darker-skinned players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a quasi-experiment in which quantitative methods (QM) are embedded within a substantive sociology module. Through measuring student attitudes before and after the intervention alongside control group comparisons, we illustrate the impact that embedding has on the student experience. Our findings are complex and even contradictory. Whilst the experimental group were less likely to be distrustful of statistics and appreciate how QM inform social research, they were also less confident about their statistical abilities, suggesting that through ‘doing’ quantitative sociology the experimental group are exposed to the intricacies of method and their optimism about their own abilities is challenged. We conclude that embedding QM in a single substantive module is not a ‘magic bullet’ and that a wider programme of content and assessment diversification across the curriculum is preferential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life course has become a topic of growing interest within the social sciences. Attempts to link this sub-discipline with life span developmental psychology have been called for but with little sign of success. In this paper, we seek to address three interlinked issues concerning the potential for a more productive interchange between life course sociology and life span psychology. The first is to try to account for the failure of these two sub-disciplines to achieve any deepening engagement with each other, despite the long-expressed desirability of that goal; the second is to draw attention to the scope for enriching the sociology of the life course through Erik Erikson’s model of life span development; and the last is the potential for linking Eriksonian theory with current debates within mainstream sociology about the processes involved in ‘individualisation’ and ‘self-reflexivity’ as an alternative entry point to bring together these two fields of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of sociology have concentrated on the development of theory rather than methods. This article examines the work of five women researchers associated with the London School of Economics in the early 20th century to highlight an aspect of this neglected history: the development of research methods. Mildred Bulkley, Maud Davies, Amy Harrison, Bessie Hutchins and Varvara De Vesselitsky all carried out empirical research on the sociology of work, women and the household deploying multiple research methods, including surveys, interviews, observations, covert ethnography and diaries and schedules for recording household diets and finances. Their work combined a sensitivity to social context and lived experience within a framework integrating the drive to social reform with a focus on scientific sociology. Very little of this work is known today. An awareness of it changes our understanding of disciplinary history, particularly with respect to the provenance of research methods, and their role in establishing academic sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note is a conversation between ChatGPT and a sociologist about the use of ChatGPT in knowledge production. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model, programmed to analyse vast amounts of data, recognise patterns and generate human-like conversational responses based on that analysis. The research note takes an experimental form, following the shape of a dialogue, and was generated in real time, between the author and ChatGPT. The conversation reflects on, and is a reflexive contribution to, the study of artificial intelligence from a sociology of science perspective. It draws on the notion of reflexivity and adopts an ironic, parodic form to critically respond to the emergence of artificial intelligence language models, their affective and technical qualities, and thereby comments on their potential ethical, social and political significance within the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between past experience of involuntary immobility in a family and the current migration intentions of its members. While family migration experience has been shown to be positively related to migration intentions, the role of past unrealised migration intentions in a family is understudied. Using the case of the former communist bloc, we focus on the migration intentions of people whose family members' mobility aspirations were stifled by the restrictive political regime. Drawing on data from the Life in Transition III Survey, we show that close relatives of people who had been prohibited from going abroad under communist rule are more likely to report migration intentions compared with people without such family experience. We explain these findings with the intergenerational transmission of mobility aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbolic boundaries shape how we see and understand both ourselves and those around us. Amid periods of crisis, these boundaries can appear more salient, sharpening distinctions between 'us' and 'them' and reinforcing inequalities in the social landscape. Based on 50 in-depth interviews about pandemic experiences among Canadians with disabilities and chronic health conditions, we examine how this community distinguishes between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving', and how emotions related to blame and resentment inform the boundaries they draw. We find that people with disabilities and chronic health conditions drew boundaries based on unequal health statuses and vulnerabilities and between those who are and are not legitimately entitled to government aid. Underlying these dimensions are a familiar set of moral tropes that respondents use to assert their own superiority and to inveigh their frustrations. Together, they play an important role in solidifying boundaries between groups, complicating public perceptions of policy responses to crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in stigma and its effects on life-course trajectories of disabled people. However, sociological narratives largely adopt monolithic understandings of disability, neglecting contextual meanings of different impairments and conditions and their intersections with other ascriptive inequalities, which may be consequential for exposure to stigma. Our article provides an intersectional analysis of disabled young people's lived experiences of stigma in mainstream school settings. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 35 autistic, dyslexic and/or physically disabled students, we show that stigmatisation is contingent on social class background, which affects students' location within the school. We also find substantial variation in experiences of stigma between and within sub-categories of conditions/impairments, as a consequence of the perceived distance from normative ideals of skills and behaviour attached to individuals in school settings. Our findings highlight the importance of intersectional analyses of stigma, challenging universalised views about stigmatised disabled people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While regularly applied to globalized migration, conceptualizations of hospitality have rarely been used to understand healthcare settings. Drawing on interviews with healthcare staff in Sweden, our article contributes to the current conceptualization of hospitality accounting for: the internal contradictions of hospitality that racialized staff experience in their everyday interactions with patients and other staff; the shifting boundaries between host and guest in everyday healthcare practices, especially when examined through the lens of racialization and finally; the subtle though troubled coexistence of hostility and un(conditional) hospitality that weakens resistance against racism. The analysis maps the complex contingencies of professional, ethnic and national relations between staff and patients, in light of their racialized and gendered nature, to suggest that the ambivalences theorized as part of the concept of hospitality show how the hurts of racism are so hard to pinpoint. [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]

This article explores internal border controls in 1980s Britain, examining how they were conceptualised and resisted by a group of activists, the No Pass Laws Here! Group. Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hull History Centre and the Institute of Race Relations and focusing analysis on the Group's public-facing information leaflets and bulletins, this article explores how internal border controls created differentiated access to employment and the welfare state, targeting migrant and racialised residents and citizens. The No Pass Laws Here! Group's framing and analysis, in particular their use of pass laws as a frame through which to apprehend the spread of internal border controls, this article argues, allows us to draw out the continuities between policies developed to maintain colonial rule and those present in the metropole. [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]