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This paper involves an examination of skilled manual work in the modern paper industry. The data were collected at five mills in three countries -- the UK, Australia and the USA. The questions were formulated in order to probe four theories of skilled work. The results suggest that the distinction between skilled and nonskilled work is a fundamental feature of occupational differentiation in all five plants. They also reveal that there are intra-skilled conflicts over relative pay and demarcation lines and that these are affected by the wider socio-political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about Islamophobia have been blighted by the question of whether the prejudice can be defined as a form of racism or as hostility to religion (or a combination of the two). This paper sheds light on this debate by presenting the findings of a new nationally representative survey, focused on the UK, that contrasts perceptions of Muslims not only with perceptions of other ethnic and religious minorities but also with perceptions of Islam as a religious tradition. We find that prejudice against Muslims is higher than for any other group examined other than Travellers. We also find contrasting demographic drivers of prejudice towards Muslims and towards Islam. Across most prejudice measures we analyse, intolerant views are generally significantly associated with being male, voting Conservative and being older, although not with Anglican identity. We find, however, that class effects vary depending on the question's focus. Anti‐immigration sentiment – including support for a 'Muslim ban' – is significantly correlated with being working‐class. However, prejudice towards Islam as a body of teachings (tested using a question measuring perceptions of religious literalism) is significantly correlated with being middle‐class, as is negative sentiment towards Travellers. Using these findings, the paper makes an argument for supplementing recent scholarship on the associations between racism and Islamophobia with analyses focusing on misperceptions of belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite predominantly lower social class origins, the second generation of established immigrant groups in the UK are now attaining high levels of education. However, they continue to experience poorer labour market outcomes than the majority population. These worse outcomes are often attributed in part to their disadvantaged origins, which do not, by contrast, appear to constrain their educational success. This paper engages with this paradox. We discuss potential mechanisms for second‐generation educational success and how far we might expect these to be replicated in labour market outcomes. We substantiate our discussion with new empirical analysis. Drawing on a unique longitudinal study of England and Wales spanning 40 years and encompassing one per cent of the population, we present evidence on the educational and labour market outcomes of the second generation of four groups of immigrants and the white British majority, controlling for multiple measures of social origins. We demonstrate that second‐generation men and women's educational advantage is only partially reflected in the labour market. We reflect on the implications of our findings for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long been interested in the meaning workers derive from their jobs. The issue has garnered increasing academic and policy attention in recent years with the concept of "meaningful work," yet little is known about how social stratification relates to access to it. This paper addresses this issue by exploring how the meaningfulness of jobs—as rated by their incumbents—is stratified across classes and occupations in a national survey of 14,000 working adults in the United Kingdom. It finds modest differentials between classes, with those in routine and manual occupations reporting the lowest levels of meaningfulness and those in managerial and professional occupations and small employers and own account workers reporting the highest levels. Detailed job attributes (e.g., job complexity and development opportunities) explain much of the differences in meaningfulness between classes and occupations, and much of the overall variance in meaningfulness. The main exception is the specific case of how useful workers perceive their jobs to be for society: A handful of occupations relating to health, social care, and protective services which cut across classes stand out from all other occupations. The paper concludes that the modest stratification between classes and occupations in meaningful work is largely due to disparities in underlying job complexity and development opportunities. The extent to which these aspects of work can be improved, and so meaningfulness, especially in routine and manual occupations, is an open, yet urgent, question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nazanin Zaghari‐Ratcliffe, an Iranian‐British dual citizen, was detained by the Iranian state from April 2016 to March 2022 and charged with spying and propaganda activities against the Iranian state without due process. After her release and return to the UK, Zaghari‐Ratcliffe criticized the UK government in a press conference, which triggered a Twitter campaign using the hashtags “sendherback” and “ungrateful.” This campaign claimed that she did not show “enough gratitude” to Britain, the country that “saved” her. In this paper, we investigate the content of the Twitter campaign. Using the concept of anti‐citizenship, we focus on xeno‐racist discourses around Zaghari‐Ratcliffe's dual nationality and how her belonging in Britain is challenged. We explore the role Zaghari‐Ratcliffe's Iranian background plays in how her Britishness is rendered suspect, which then enables the racialized tropes in the #sendherback campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses content and thematic analyses to examine how UK public service broadcasting (PSB) reported on the Covid‐19 pandemic prior to the first lockdown on March 23, 2020. This was a period when the British government's response to the pandemic was being heavily criticised by the World Health Organisation and other parts of the scientific community. This paper finds that in PSB these criticisms were muted and partially given. Instead, broadcasting explained in detail—and directly endorsed—government policy, including the 'herd immunity' approach. Most coverage of international responses focused on the United States and Europe with little attention paid to states that had successfully suppressed the virus. When such states were featured their public health measures were not explained nor compared to the UK's strategy with the consequence that PSB was unable to alert the public to measures that could have contained the virus and saved lives. These patterns in PSB coverage can be explained by the close links between key lobby journalists and the government's communication machine as well as the broader political and social contexts surrounding broadcasting at the onset of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on multisited qualitative research in Italy and the UK, this paper documents the dark side of onward migration and the experiences faced by Italian‐Bangladeshis in the UK after the Brexit referendum. The findings show that compared to their position in Italy, Italian‐Bangladeshis experienced a downgrading in symbolic, identity‐related, and, specifically, socio‐economic and cultural aspects in the UK society. The paper also uncovers the potential strategies that Italian‐Bangladeshis intend to adopt in case they lose the special rights provided to them by EU citizenship after Brexit. Since the majority of them have moved to the United Kingdom to build a future for their children, they find themselves forced to further reconfigure their strategies and reactivate different degrees of mobility in order to avoid the loss of social rights (access to welfare, the status of citizens) and material resources (housing and better working conditions) that they have long assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Abstract: Several papers published in recent years have revived interest in Sorokin's dissociative thesis: the view that intergenerational social mobility has detrimental effects on the social relationships and wellbeing of individuals. In this paper, I test the dissociative thesis using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society. On a wide range of indicators that measure participation in civic associations, contact with parents, close personal relationships, social support, subjective wellbeing, etc. individuals who have achieved long‐range upward mobility (i.e. those who move from working class origin to salariat destination) tend to fare better than those who are immobile in the working class. Those who have experienced long‐range downward mobility (moving from salariat origin to working class destination) do about as well as second‐generation members of the working class. Overall, there is no support for Sorokin's thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paper by Breen and Goldthorpe recently claimed to have exposed 'fatal flaws' in my work on meritocracy in Britain. This paper responds to their criticisms. The results of their re-analysis of the NCDS data set are shown to be consistent with my earlier findings and arguments. Furthermore, re-running some of my earlier models using measures that they favour and a method designed to privilege their position, the results once again demonstrate that, while class origins have some effect on class destinations (in particular, for those born into the middle class), ability and effort exert a much greater effect. Based on these results, the paper identifies three core propositions about meritocracy in Britain on which all parties to this debate should now be able to agree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of mobility which surrounded the London 2012 Olympics. We provide a critical discussion of the mobility conflicts, problems and criticisms which emerged from our research with local people in the Stratford and wider Newham areas of London, where most Olympic events were located. The paper is divided into four broad parts. First, we identify and discuss the relevant components of the 'mobilities paradigm' in social science which underpin our analysis. Second, we briefly outline our research methods, centring particularly on fieldwork and interviews with different social groups. Third, we examine in detail the six main themes of mobility politics which were evident at London 2012, relating to social context, event construction, event mobility systems, commercial mobilities, the mobile politics of exclusion, and contested modes of mobility. In doing so, we seek to extend the mobilities paradigm by introducing various concepts and keywords - notably on the three-speed city, entryability, mobility panics, instrumental mobility, and corporate kettling - which may be utilized by social scientists to examine mobility systems in other social contexts. We conclude by reaffirming the significance of mobility-focused research at sport and other megaevents, and by indicating future lines of inquiry for social scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the impact of current and anticipated parenthood on cohabitation and remarriage among those formerly living in marriage-type relationships. The focus on children is embedded within a broader analysis of repartnering which takes account of other factors, including gender. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are used, with a multivariate analysis of repartnering patterns,using data from the General Household Survey, being complemented by in-depth interview data examining the attitudes of the formerly married to future relationships. The paper demonstrates that parenthood has a statistically significant effect on the likelihood of formerly married women repartnering, with a higher number of children being associated with a lower probability of repartnering. The presence of children can work against repartnering in a variety of ways. Children place demands on their parents and can deter or object to potential partners.Parents may see their parental role as more important than, and a barrier to, new relationships. However, mothers are typically looking for partners for themselves rather than fathers for their children. Among formerly married people without children,the desire to become a parent encourages repartnering. The paper concludes that parenthood should be a key consideration in analyses of repartnering.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a long record of research on the sources of the gender wage gap, a large fraction of gender wage differences remains unexplained. In this paper, we propose gender differences in social capital as a novel explanation for the gender wage gap. We use British data from the Understanding Society (UKHLS) survey and wage decompositions to estimate the contribution of social capital derived from network homophily, that is, the similarity to one's peer group, to the gender wage differential. Our results show that differences in network structure explain as much as 15% of the overall gender wage gap. This finding is largely driven by gender differences in the number of males among closest friends, while other social capital measures used in this study hardly matter. We further show that differences in returns to social capital are not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after coming to power in Britain, the Conservative- Liberal Democratic alliance placed family life at the heart of their political agenda, and set out their plans to reform adoption. The paper draws upon debates about the reforms and considers them in articulation with concerns about health of the nation expressed in political pronouncements on 'broken Britain' and the failures of 'state multiculturalism'. The paper considers the debates about domestic (transracial) and intercountry adoption, and uses feminist postcolonial perspectives to argue that we can only understand what are expressed as national issues within a transnational and postcolonial framework which illuminate the processes of state and institutional race-making. The paper analyses three key instances of biopower and governmentality in the adoption debates: the population, the normalizing family and the individual. The paper argues that we need to understand the reforms as part of a wider concern with the 'problem' of multicultural belonging, and that the interlocking discourses of nation, family and identities are crucial to the constitution and regulation of gendered, racialized subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Trojan Horse" scandal laid bare an anxiety at the heart of the British security establishment; an anxiety that brings together questions of identity, values, and security within the demand to manage radicalization. It is an anxiety that, I will argue, reveals a novel conceptualization of threat that has driven the UK's security and communities policies within the "war on terror." This conceptualization emerges within Prevent, the UK's counter-radicalization strategy. Yet, I argue, the extensive literature on Prevent has failed to adequately articulate this underlying, core logic. To date, the Prevent literature has effectively demonstrated the ways in which Muslim communities in the United Kingdom have been policed through British counter-radicalization policy. Yet, this analysis struggles to explain the expansion of Prevent into a wider range of "extremist" spaces. In this article, I contend that it is more useful to situate Prevent as a particular conception of power; a logic and an analysis of threat that demands new forms of government intervention. To do so, this article provides a genealogical reading of Prevent, locating it as a radical extension of state security ambitions to intervene early, making explicit a vision of security in which life as a process of becoming is produced as an object of management. The paper draws out the ramifications of this analysis to think through fundamental shifts in the principles and practices of contemporary security aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous paper it has been shown that across three cohorts of men and women born in Britain in 1946, 1958 and 1970 a gender difference exists in regard to relative rates of class mobility. For men these rates display an essential stability but for women they become more equal. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the causes of this trend-or, that is, of increasing social fluidity-among women. We begin by considering a refined version of the perverse fluidity hypothesis: that is, one that proposes that part-time work leads to increasing downward worklife mobility among women that also entails downward intergenerational mobility and thus promotes greater fluidity. We do in fact find that the increase in fluidity is very largely, if not entirely, confined to women who have had at least one period of part-time work. However, a more direct test of the hypothesis is not supportive. We are then led to investigate whether it is not that part-time working itself is the crucial factor but rather that women who subsequently work part-time already differ from those who do not at entry into employment. We find that eventual full- and part-timers do not differ in their class origins nor, in any systematic way, in their educational qualifications. But there is a marked and increasing difference in the levels of employment at which they make their labour market entry. Eventual part-timers are more likely than eventual full-timers to enter in working-class positions, regardless of their class origins and qualifications. Insofar as these women are from more advantaged origins, they would appear not to seek to exploit their advantages to the same extent as do full-timers in order to advance their own work careers. And it is, then, in the downward mobility accepted by these women-who increase in number across the cohorts-that we would locate the main source of the weakening association between class origins and destinations that is revealed among women at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now that most UK universities have increased their tuition fees to £9,000 a year and are implementing new Access Agreements as required by the Office for Fair Access, it has never been more important to examine the extent of fair access to UK higher education and to more prestigious UK universities in particular. This paper uses Universities and Colleges Admissions Service ( UCAS) data for the period 1996 to 2006 to explore the extent of fair access to prestigious Russell Group universities, where 'fair' is taken to mean equal rates of making applications to and receiving offers of admission from these universities on the part of those who are equally qualified to enter them. The empirical findings show that access to Russell Group universities is far from fair in this sense and that little changed following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their initial increase to £3,000 a year in 2006. Throughout this period, UCAS applicants from lower class backgrounds and from state schools remained much less likely to apply to Russell Group universities than their comparably qualified counterparts from higher class backgrounds and private schools, while Russell Group applicants from state schools and from Black and Asian ethnic backgrounds remained much less likely to receive offers of admission from Russell Group universities in comparison with their equivalently qualified peers from private schools and the White ethnic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments' attempts to manage immigration increasingly restrict immigrants' eligibility to healthcare, education, and welfare benefits. This article examines the operation of these restrictions in the United Kingdom. It draws on qualitative research with civil servants and NGO expert advisors, and applies sociological theories on bureaucracy as a lens to interpret these data. Conceptually, the paper employs a generative synthesis of Ritzer's notion of "irrational rationality" and Foucault's perspective on "governmentality" to explain observed outcomes. Findings show that public service workers struggle with complex and opaque regulations, which grant different entitlements to different categories of migrants. The confusion results in mistakes, arbitrary decisions, and hypercorrection, but also a system‐wide indifference to irrational outcomes, supported by human factors in contexts of austerity. I consider this a form of governmentality‐effected neglect, where power operates as much through inaction as well as through intention, but which results in exclusions of legal migrants that are harsher in practice than in law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent revival in interest in class subjectivity has been largely premised on class belonging as a form of identity, eschewing talk of class-consciousness. Evidence in this debate has been mostly qualitative and focused on specific social groups. This paper uses data from the 2003 British Social Attitudes Survey to map the sense of class belonging in England and to assess the strength of class belonging when placed alongside other social identities, such as gender and nationality. The paper also explores the extent to which class identity could be conceived of as class-consciousness through its links with attitudes to redistribution and workplace relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of part-time employment in the balancing of women's employment and family lives has generated an immense literature. Using data on women working part-time and full-time in different level occupations in the British Household Panel Survey, this paper argues that it is now vital to move these balancing debates on from their location within work-family rhetoric and to re-position the study of women's working time in broader work-life discussions. Work-family debates tend to neglect a number of key domains that women balance in their lives, in addition to family and employment, including their financial security and their leisure. The paper shows that examining the financial situations and the leisure lives of female part-timers in lower level jobs reveals a less positive picture of their 'life balancing' than is portrayed in much work-family literature. Instead, they emerged as the least financially secure employees and, linked to this, less satisfied with their social lives too. It is concluded that since the work-life system is multi- and not just two-dimensional, it is important to examine how all life domains interrelate with each other. In this way, we would be in a better position to begin to assess all the benefits and disadvantages associated with working part-time and with other work-life balancing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relationship between social engagement, particularly civic engagement, and education. It is well known that more highly educated people are more likely to engage in voluntary work in formalized settings. It has been difficult to disentangle the effect of higher education from that of family origin and occupational socialization. This paper examines the effects of tertiary education on the social and civic engagement of young people, using the British Household Panel Study. The social and civic activity of young people is observed in their late teens, before entering the labour market or tertiary education, and compared with that of the same young people in their early 20s, after completing tertiary education courses or gaining labour market experience. It was found that the social and civic engagement of young people who would enter higher education was higher in their late teens than that of their peers who did not enter. However, higher education had a small additional effect on civic engagement, for both young and mature students. The children of professionals were the social grouping most likely to be involved in civic activities. The relationship of higher education, professional occupations and family socialization is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply by Richard Breen and John H. Goldthorpe to Peter Saunders' criticisms about their work on meritocracy in Great Britain. Saunders has argued, on the basis of analyses of the National Child Development Study data-set, that present-day Britain is to a large extent a meritocratic society: where individuals end up within the class structure is largely determined by their ability and effort. Saunders' difficulties stem in large part from his original concern to expose British sociologists' commitment to what he has labelled the social advantages and disadvantages (SAD) thesis. In both our previous papers our aim has been simply to test the meritocracy thesis--not to support the SAD thesis, nor to run a competition between the two theses. In our first paper our strategy was to begin by establishing the level and pattern of the class origins-class destinations association and then to see what happens to this association when the individual merit variables of ability, effort and educational attainment, as best these can be constructed, are brought into the analysis. Saunders now contends that this approach is flawed and in fact biased against the meritocracy thesis because of problems of measurement error and of omitted variables. But in neither respect do his arguments stand up to examination. It is apparent that Saunders' misunderstandings arise from the fact that he seeks to impose upon us the strategy of the variable race that he himself favors. Thus, he contends that in our approach any residual variation in class outcomes is automatically attributed to class origins or, in other words, the default is set to favor the SAD thesis. Finally in this connection we would note that in our second paper addressing the meritocracy thesis, we develop our original approach to try to mitigate both problems of measurement error and those of deciding just how closely a particular society at a particular point in time approximates the meritocratic ideal.

This paper is concerned to chart the establishment and uses of CCTV within the location of Liverpool city centre. In doing this the paper seeks to contextualize CCTV within contemporary 'partnership' approaches to regeneration which are reshaping the material and discursive form of the city. Thus CCTV schemes along with other security initiatives are understood as social ordering strategies emanating from within locally powerful networks which are seeking to define and enact orderly regeneration projects. In focusing on the normative aspects of CCTV, the paper raises questions concerning the efficacy of understanding contemporary forms of 'social ordering practices' primarily in terms of technical rationalities while neglecting other, more material and ideological processes involved in the construction of social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police on 4 August 2011, there were riots in many large cities in the UK. As the rioting was widely perceived to be perpetrated by the urban poor, links were quickly made with Britain's welfare policies. In this paper, we examine whether the riots, and the subsequent media coverage, influenced attitudes toward welfare recipients. Using the British Social Attitudes survey, we use multivariate difference-in-differences regression models to compare attitudes toward welfare recipients among those interviewed before (pre-intervention: i.e. prior to 6 August) and after (post-intervention: 10 August-10 September) the riots occurred (N = 3,311). We use variation in exposure to the media coverage to test theories of media persuasion in the context of attitudes toward welfare recipients. Before the riots, there were no significant differences between newspaper readers and non-readers in their attitudes towards welfare recipients. However, after the riots, attitudes diverged. Newspaper readers became more likely than non-readers to believe that those on welfare did not really deserve help, that the unemployed could find a job if they wanted to and that those on the dole were being dishonest in claiming benefits. Although the divergence was clearest between right-leaning newspaper and non-newspaper readers, we do not a find statistically significant difference between right- and left-leaning newspapers. These results suggest that media coverage of the riots influenced attitudes towards welfare recipients; specifically, newspaper coverage of the riots increased the likelihood that readers of the print media expressed negative attitudes towards welfare recipients when compared with the rest of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes the contemporary emergence of 'morality' in both sociological argument and political rhetoric, and analyses its significance in relation to ongoing UK welfare reforms. It revisits the idea of 'moral economy' and identifies two strands in its contemporary application; that all economies depend on an internal moral schema, and that some external moral evaluation is desirable. UK welfare reform is analysed as an example of the former, with reference to three distinct orientations advanced in the work of Freeden (), Laclau (), and Lockwood (). In this light, the paper then considers challenges to the reform agenda, drawn from third sector and other public sources. It outlines the forms of argument present in these challenges, based respectively on rationality, legality, and morality, which together provide a basis for evaluation of the welfare reforms and for an alternative 'moral economy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces and explains the emergence of the mental health users movement in Great Britain, focusing specifically upon the formation of the Mental Patients Union in the early 1970s. The analysis presented in the paper draws, to some extent, from conventional movement theory. In addition, however, it draws from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This represents an innovation in movement analysis and the necessity of this innovation is argued for in an early section of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnostatistics is the study of the social practices surrounding the construction and interpretation of statistics. This paper considers certain ethnostatistical aspects of the official statistics on AIDS cases - the monthly updated figures on AIDS cases supplied by the Department of Health and derived from the English and Scottish voluntary reporting schemes. The paper focuses on problems in the classification of cases according to the route of virus transmission, particularly where multiple risk practices may be reported. Some (but not all) classification problems can be avoided by adopting a cross-tabular format of presentation. The data on reported Scottish AIDS cases are re-analysed in order to illustrate such a cross-tabular representation. These data are the basis for a concluding statement on the difficulties in projecting future heterosexual epidemic spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the narrative strategies through which Polish migrants in the UK challenge the formal rights of political membership and attempt to redefine the boundaries of 'citizenship' along notions of deservedness. The analysed qualitative data originate from an online survey conducted in the months before the 2016 EU referendum, and the narratives emerge from the open‐text answers to two survey questions concerning attitudes towards the referendum and the exclusion of resident EU nationals from the electoral process. The analysis identifies and describes three narrative strategies in reaction to the public discourses surrounding the EU referendum – namely discursive complicity, intergroup hostility and defensive assertiveness – which attempt to redefine the conditions of membership in Britain's 'ethical community' in respect to welfare practices. Examining these processes simultaneously 'from below' and 'from outside' the national political community, the paper argues, can reveal more of the transformation taking place in conceptions of citizenship at the sociological level, and the article aims to identify the contours of a 'neoliberal communitarian citizenship' as internalized by mobile EU citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s several European countries have introduced language and citizenship tests as new requirements for access to long‐term residence or naturalization. The content of citizenship tests has been often presented as exclusionary in nature, in particular as it is based on the idea that access to citizenship has to be 'deserved'. In this paper, we aim to explore the citizenship tests 'from below', through the focus on the experience of migrants who prepare and take the 'Life in the UK' test, and with particular reference to how they relate to the idea of 'deservingness'. Through a set of in‐depth interviews with migrants in two different cities (Leicester and London), we show that many of them use narratives in which they distinguish between the 'deserving citizens' and the 'undeserving Others' when they reflect upon their experience of becoming citizens. In so doing, they negotiate new hierarchies of inclusion into and exclusion from citizenship, which reflect broader neo‐liberal and ethos‐based conceptions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In British social mobility discourse, the rhetoric of fair access can obscure wider issues of social justice. While socio‐economic inequalities continue to shape young people's lives, sociological work on class dis‐identification suggests social class is less obviously meaningful as a source of individual and collective identity. This paper considers subjective understandings of the post‐16 education and employment landscape in this context, drawing on qualitative research exploring the aspirations of young men and women as they completed compulsory education in north‐west England, and the hopes their parents had for their future. It shows how unequal access to resources shaped the older generation's expectations for their children, although this was rarely articulated using the explicit language of class. Their children recognized they faced a difficult job market but embraced the idea that success was possible through hard work. Both generations drew moral boundaries and made judgments based on implicit classed discourses about undeserving others, while at the same time disavowing class identities. There was a more explicit recognition of gender inequality among the parents framed with reference to hopes for greater freedom for their daughters. Opportunities and inequalities were thus understood in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to attribute success to 'luck', but failure to personal deficiency? In 2015/16, more than 34 per cent of academic employees in UK higher education institutions were employed on temporary contracts, and the sector itself has undergone a substantial transformation in recent years in terms of expansion, measurement, and marketization. Based on two waves of interviews conducted with fixed‐term academic employees at different career stages, the article explores the narrativization of success and failure amongst staff working at the 'sharp end' of the so‐called neoliberal academy. Arguing that precarious employment situations precipitate the feeling of being 'out of control', the majority of the participants' narratives were characterized by a distinct lack of agency. The paper explores the recourse to notions of chance and the consolidation of 'luck' as an explanatory factor in accounting for why good things happen; however, in tandem with this inclination is the tendency to individualize failure when expectations have been thwarted. While accounts of fixed‐term work are suffused with notions of chance and fortune, 'luck' remains an under‐researched concept within sociology. The article thus concludes by considering what the analysis of 'luck' might offer for a fuller, politicized understanding of processes at work in the contemporary academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter‐generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS‐LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS‐LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and low rates of nonresponse and attrition across waves. Additionally, the structure of the study means that we can observe the occupations of LS‐members' parents when they were children and follow their own progress in the labour market at regular intervals into middle age. Counter to widespread prevailing beliefs, our results show evidence of a small but significant increase in social fluidity between 1950s and the 1980s for both men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move within British sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engagement with policy developments and professional practices that focus on 'family' as a core, institutionalized, idea. While repudiating the necessity (and indeed, pointing out the dangers) of providing any definitive answer to definitions of 'family', the paper calls for critical reflection on the implications of these conceptual moves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution to our understanding of secularization in Britain, this paper examines the role of religious patronage. It illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century support for the churches from rural landowners and major industrial employers, considers its benefits, and explains its rapid disappearance. The paper argues that the end of the expectation that high status individuals and major employers would actively promote organized religion is both significant evidence of secularization and a cause of further decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the wider social impacts of hosting the London 2012 Olympic Games and its 'legacy' ambitions in East London, emphasizing securitization as an inbuilt feature of the urban regeneration project. Drawing on extensive original empirical research, the paper analyses the modalities of Olympic safety and security practices within the Olympic Park itself and their wider impact, while also connecting this research to theorization and debates in urban sociology and criminology. In this complex setting, a raft of formal and informal, often subtle, regulatory mechanisms have emerged, especially as visions of social ordering focused on 'cleansing' and 'purifying' have 'leaked out' from the hyper-securitized 'sterilized' environment of the Olympic Park and become embedded within the Olympic neighbourhood. In such complex circumstances, applying Douglas' (1966) work on purity and danger to the spatial realm provides a key conceptual framework to understand the form and impact of such processes. The imposition of order can be seen to not only perform 'cleansing' functions, but also articulate multiple symbolic, expressive and instrumental roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business has played a central role in the debate over Britain's place in the European Union. This paper examines the socio-economic characteristics of directors of Britain's largest corporations who affiliated either to Business for Sterling or Britain in Europe. It reports associations between directors' social backgrounds and their probabilities of affiliation. Elite university education, club membership, wealth and multiple directorships were all associated with higher propensities to affiliate. The associations are consistent with the idea that directors' social resources allow them to overcome collective action problems as well as supplying them with the motivations to affiliate. They also indicated that directors form a privileged group in that they have a number of very powerful actors who can take unilateral political actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the immediate aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on America, defending civilization was quickly established at the core of the ‘war on terror’. Unintentionally or otherwise this incorporation of civilization connected with Samuel Huntington's ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis. Within the ‘war on terror’ the dark side of counterterrorism has become apparent through international practices like extrajudicial killing, extraordinary rendition and torture. The impact of Western governments' policies upon their indigenous Muslim populations has also been problematic but social and political analysis has been relatively limited. This paper seeks to help address the scarcity of sociological contributions. Hidden costs of the UK government's attempts to utilize violence and enhance social constraints within the nation-state are identified. It is argued that although counterterrorism strategies are contributing to a self-fulfilling spiral of hatred that could be considered evidence in support of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’, the thesis is unhelpful when trying to grasp the underlying processes. Instead the paper draws upon Norbert Elias's application of the concepts of ‘civilizing’ and ‘de-civilizing’ to help improve levels of understanding about the processes and consequences of particular Muslim communities being targeted by security forces. The paper concludes with an exploration of the majority of the population's acquiescence and willingness to accept restraints upon Muslims in order to safeguard their own security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contributions made by early modern statistical literature to the formation of the sociological imagination. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, the fields of ‘political arithmetic’ and vital and moral statistics provided a discursive framework within which it became possible to identify and study aggregate dynamics and structures underlying seemingly random and episodic aspects of life (birth, death, divorce, health). Focusing primarily on developments in England, the paper identifies three significant watershed moments in the emergence of the sociological imagination: the discovery of the political and economic dimensions of life; the articulation of socio-statistical patterns underlying various life events and episodes; and the establishment of causal connections between social variables and individual choices. These developments did not amount to or directly result in the creation of the discipline of sociology, yet, they made it possible to make conceptual connections between the personal and the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the recognition in cosmopolitan debate of a possible disjuncture between the normative ideal of cosmopolitanism and its realization in practice. Taking as its focus the potential conflict between human rights commitments and national concern about immigration control, it reflects on a series of legal challenges to UK government attempts to withdraw support from asylum seekers who do not claim on entry into the country. Set in the context of socio-legal theory, these cases are analysed for signs of a ‘national’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ paradigm in judicial interpretation, and considered as a possible instance of reflexive judgment, espoused as a feature of cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly reported that fathers in Britain work longer hours than non-fathers. This statistic is frequently used as supporting evidence for the argument that the role of fathers within families remains primarily concerned with financial provisioning. In this paper it is shown, through regression models, that once other factors are taken into account the significance of fatherhood in relation to hours of paid work disappears. This highlights fatherhood as a period in the life course which often coincides with longer working hours but challenges the assumption of a causal relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper data from a nationally representative British longitudinal study are used to analyse exchanges of support between Third Age parents (aged 55–75) and their adult children. Results show that between two thirds and three quarters of parents in this age group were involved in some sort of exchange relationship with at least one of their children. Generally, more Third Age parents were providers than recipients of help, but there was a strong reciprocal element to intergenerational exchange with, for example, married parents who provided support to at least one child being twice as likely as those who did not to receive support from a child, after allowance for a range of relevant parental and child characteristics. Parental characteristics associated with higher probability of providing help included higher income, home ownership and being married or widowed rather than divorced. Higher income and home ownership were, however, negatively associated with odds of receiving help from a child, again after adjustment for other co-variates, suggesting socio-economic differences in the balance of support exchanges. Children seem responsive to parental needs in that receipt of help from a child was positively associated with older parental age and with parental disability. The paper shows that in Britain, as in the USA, the balance of intergenerational exchanges involving Third Age adults is downward rather than upward, in contravention of depictions of older adults as‘burdens’ on younger generations. Current demographic and social changes are, it is argued, likely to increase support demands from adult children to Third Age parents in coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses financial credit in order to re-examine the work of Norbert Elias, particularly his association of interdependency complexity with social discipline, and his approach to contradiction. Following a discussion of these issues, the paper examines Elias's writing on money and explores the emergence of financial credit networks in early modern England. Attention is paid to credit networks and social discipline, to credit and the state, and to the contradictory images associated with the transition to modern cash economies. From one perspective, early modern credit networks might be read as a confirmation of Elias, particularly his argument that interdependency complexity, changing power balances and self-restraint are interwoven. Yet the development of modern cash money raises questions, not just in relation to Elias's treatment of money, but also with regard to his assumptions about social discipline and his approach to ambivalence and contradiction. Drawing on the foregoing discussion, the paper argues that the relation between interdependency complexity and social discipline is contingent and variable, and that interdependency complexity may simultaneously encourage contradictory processes, such as those of civilizing and barbarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security work in urban licensed premises is a risky occupation in Britain's fast expanding liminal night-time economy. Sociologically, little is known about this masculinist work, including those embodied strategies used by doorstaff or 'bouncers' to regulate 'unruly' bodies in and around commercial space. Using participant observational data generated in south-west Britain, this paper describes how the door supervisors' routine work tasks (largely comprising requests and demands) provide the conditions of possibility for hierarchical conflict and (near) violence between themselves and (potential) customers inside and at the entrances to licensed premises. Besides providing a thick description of this work and the phenomenology of physical violence, the paper supports recent theoretical arguments for an explicitly embodied sociology. Centrally, the paper maintains that bodies matter and that an empirical, interpretative sociology cannot ignore the corporeal dimensions of social life if it is to arrive at an adequate understanding of everynight tensions and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non-white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter-related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from other ethnic groups has declined over time for both white and ethnic minority Britons. For the white majority there are both period and cohort elements to this decline. Secondly, we see some evidence that social distance between the majority and minority groups is reciprocal. Specifically, minorities who experience rejection by the white British feel a greater sense of distance from them. Thirdly, we find that all groups share the perception of the same ethnic hierarchy. We see evidence of particularly widespread hostility towards Muslim Britons from all ethnic groups suggesting that Muslims are singled out for negative attention from many British residents of all other backgrounds, including a large number who do not express hostility to other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the intersecting sociologies of ethnicity and migration work from a series of interconnected blind spots hindering effective analysis of the current UK situation. Both operate analytically within the limitations of an 'immigrant problem' framework; are overinvested in state agendas; privilege a nation state analysis; are narrowly focused on distributions of migrant bodies, and on receiving, at the expense of sending, contexts. Exploring these limitations with data derived from a modest small-scale qualitative study of young Chinese migrants in London, I argue for a reframing along four dimensions. Firstly, in an era of elite migration, sociology could reach beyond its immigrant problem framework and open up to a broader range of UK migrant ethnicities and circumstances. Secondly, a stronger focus on cities as the scale on which lives are lived, and through which diverse streams of translocal activity are routed, would open new avenues of sociological exploration. Thirdly, including translocal activities connected with distributions of ethnic migrant bodies, such as capital transfers, would broaden its focus, taking migration and ethnicity more centrally into the analysis of globalization as one of its constituting practices. Finally, paying attention to sending, as well as arrival cities, reveals migrants' thinking and shapes the ways in which they live, as my data shows. The Chinese are both one of the UK's neglected minorities, and one of its fastest growing populations. They are a good example of new UK migrants and they bring globalization's realignment with the rising significance of China to the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hidden barriers, or 'gender pay gap', preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class-origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey ( N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this 'class ceiling' is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high-status occupations who are from working-class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the 'engine room' of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high-status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against Beck's claims that conventional sociological concepts and categories are zombie categories, this paper argues that Durkheim's theoretical framework in which suicide is a symptom of an anomic state of society can help us understand the diversity of trajectories that transnational migrants follow and that shape their suicide rates within a cosmopolitan society. Drawing on ethnographic data collected on eight suicides and three attempted suicide cases of second-generation male Alevi Kurdish migrants living in London, this article explains the impact of segmented assimilation/adaptation trajectories on the incidence of suicide and how their membership of a 'new rainbow underclass', as a manifestation of cosmopolitan society, is itself an anomic social position with a lack of integration and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent research evidencing that young men are redefining the essential components of what it is to be a man, this paper draws on qualitative interviews with 22 elite-level, English Premier League academy level football (soccer) players to investigate their performances and understandings of masculinity in relation to decreasing homohysteria. Even in this gender-segregated, near-total institution, these working-class, non-educationally aspiring adolescents evidence an attenuated performance of 'maleness' and improved attitudinal disposition toward homosexuality. Congruent with insights developed by inclusive masculinity scholars, respondents maintained emotional closeness and physical tactility with male teammates and friends. These more inclusive attitudes and homosocial behaviours were, however, slightly more conservative than in other recent research. We close by explaining this variation with reference to theoretical apparatus' provided by Goffman and Bourdieu to advance theoretical debates about social class and masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology traditionally accounts for eating in terms of the social organization of meals, their provision and consumption. A recurrent public concern is that the meal is being subverted. This paper examines meal arrangements in British households in 2012, drawing on an online survey in the format of a food diary administered to 2784 members of a supermarket consumer panel. It charts the organization of contemporary eating occasions, paying attention to socio-demographic variation in practice. Especially, it explores companionless meals, putting them in contexts of food provisioning and temporal rhythms. Findings show that eating alone is associated with simpler, quicker meals, and that it takes place most commonly in the morning and midday. Those living alone eat alone more often, but at similar meal times, and they take longer over their lone meals. Comparison with a similar study in 1955-6 suggests some fragmentation or relaxation in collective schedules. The implications are not straightforward, and the causes probably lie more in institutional shifts than personal preferences. Declining levels of commensality are, however, associated with a reduction in household size and, especially in households with children, difficulties of coordinating family members' schedules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to define the underclass and then test the predictions of three competing theories in the underclass debate. Using the National Child Development Study for the analysis it is found that an 'underclass' suffering from a lack of qualifications, low cognitive ability and chronic joblessness exists. The validity of making a distinction between the working class and an 'underclass' has often been questioned both because of the dubious history of such a distinction and because it is not believed that such a distinction is empirically true. The results in this paper contradict this assertion by finding the underclass to be distinctive from the working class in terms of patterns of family formation, work commitment and political allegiance. The distinct attitudes of the underclass, when coupled with evidence of inter- and intra-generational stability of membership, provide early evidence that a new social class, the underclass, may now exist in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]