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We present the first comprehensive set of estimates of variation in intergenerational social mobility across regions of Great Britain using data from the UK Labour Force Survey. Unlike the Social Mobility Index produced by the Social Mobility Commission, we focus directly on variation in measures of intergenerational social class mobility between the regions in which individuals were brought up. We define regions using the NUTS classification and we consider three levels, from 11 large NUTS1 regions, to 168 NUTS3 regions, across England, Wales, and Scotland. We investigate whether it is possible to form an index of social mobility from these measures and we address a neglected question: how much does the region in which someone was raised matter in comparison with the social class in which they were raised?, (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This study investigates structural inequalities in educational enjoyment in a contemporary cohort of United Kingdom (UK) primary school children. Foundational studies in the sociology of education consistently indicate that the enjoyment of education is stratified by social class, gender, and ethnicity. Analysing data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, which is a major cohort study that tracks children born at the start of the 21st century, we examine children's enjoyment of both school and individual academic subject areas. The overarching message is that at age 11 most children enjoy their education. The detailed empirical analyses indicate that educational enjoyment is stratified by gender, and there are small differences between ethnic groups. However, there is no convincing evidence of a social class gradient. These results challenge orthodox sociological views on the relationship between structural inequalities and educational enjoyment, and therefore question the existing theoretical understanding of the wider role of enjoyment in education., (© 2024 The Author(s). The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Social and spatial mobility have been subject to substantial recent sociological and policy debate. Complementing other recent work, in this paper we explore these patterns in relation to higher education. Making use of high-quality data from the higher education statistics agency (HESA), we ran a set of multilevel models to test whether the local authority areas where young people grow up influence social and spatial mobility into a higher professional or managerial job on graduation. We found entry to these patterns reflect pre-existing geographies of wealth and income, with more affluent rural and suburban areas in South-East England having higher levels of entry to these occupations. Graduates clustered from major cities tended to be spatially immobile and those from peripheral areas further away from these cities show a higher density of long-distance moves following graduation. We also explored the intersection between social and spatial mobility for graduates with the economic geography of Britain, showing that access to high-class occupations is not necessarily associated with long-distance moves across most British districts. Our evidence further suggests that the 'London effect', where working-class students have higher school attainment than their peers elsewhere, may not continue through to graduate employment., (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

We analyse social mobility in London and seek to address two paradoxes. Among people living in London, relative mobility, or social fluidity, appears to be remarkably low when compared with other regions of Great Britain. But social fluidity among people who were brought up in London is similar to that of people brought up elsewhere in Britain. This is our first paradox. Furthermore, it is widely held that social fluidity is higher among people with higher levels of education, yet, the proportion of people with a University degree is much higher among people living in London than in any other region: how is this compatible with its relatively low social fluidity? This is our second paradox. We address these puzzles and find that they are largely explained by patterns of migration into and out of London by two groups that have received little attention hitherto in studies of mobility in the capital: International migrants and people who were brought up in London but who no longer live there., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

We use data from a large-scale and nationally representative survey to examine whether there is in Britain a trade-off between social diversity and social cohesion. Using six separate measures of social cohesion (generalised trust, volunteering, giving to charity, inter-ethnic friendship, and two neighbourhood cohesion scales) and four measures of social diversity (ethnic fractionalisation, religious fractionalisation, percentage Muslim, and percentage foreign-born), we show that, net of individual covariates, there is a negative association between social diversity and most measures of social cohesion. But these associations largely disappear when neighbourhood deprivation is taken into account. These results are robust to alternative definitions of neighbourhood. We also investigate the possibility that the diversity--cohesion trade-off is found in more segregated neighbourhoods. But we find very little evidence to support that claim. Overall, it is material deprivation, not diversity, that undermines social cohesion., (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Organizations far beyond traditional academic institutions have become prolific science producers, with many now providing evidence-based advice for national governments and policy-makers. Neo-institutional sociology explains organizations' growing investment in research activities and research-based policy advice by the all-embracing scientization and the expansion of the educated population, phenomena observable throughout the world. There is, however, considerably less knowledge about how the organizations' increased knowledge production and the supply of science-based policy advice are reflected in national policy-making, including the legislative work of parliaments, and to what extent distinct organizations are deemed authoritative in different countries. In this paper, we examine how different organizations are used as scientific authorities in parliamentary debates over new legislation. Drawing on analyses of 576 parliamentary debates from Australia, Finland, Kenya, and the United Kingdom, we study what organizations are acknowledged as scientific authorities and the relative weight of different organization types in the context of political debates over new legislation. The results reveal that while organizations in general are frequently evoked as scientific authorities in all four countries, there is remarkable variation in the types of organizations considered authoritative in different national contexts. We elaborate these findings by analysing ways in which politicians evaluate organizations as sources of scientific authority. While the same set of evaluative schemas are used in all four countries, each is typically applied to certain types of organization. The results suggest that both the supply of scientific policy advice and political culture shape legislators' rhetorical practices when drawing on organizations' scientific authority., (© 2022 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

The developing discourse around social investment and impact investing makes strong claims regarding the possibility of both furthering one's own interests while simultaneously acting for the benefit of others-"doing good and doing well". Such claims are central to UK- and US-centric attempts to reform capitalism in the face of multiple global crises. This article uses Foucault's writing on (neo)liberal governmentality to analyze a particular manifestation of the logic of "doing good and doing well": the attempt to build a market for social investment in the UK between 2010 and 2016, a project closely related to the development of the broader impact investment movement. Building on a close reading of Foucault's writing on the role of self-interest, it is argued that two incompatible versions of social investment are present within the development of the market: one (the "innovative version") that assumes purpose and profit are fully compatible, and one (the "principled version") that assumes it is important to maintain a boundary between them. The relevance of these findings and the approach used is discussed in relation to the social studies of market, and ongoing efforts to develop a critique of "doing good and doing well"., (© 2022 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

We use data from Understanding Society to evaluate several claims advanced by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere. We show that geographically mobile individuals are indeed more likely to support Remain in the EU referendum, as Goodhart suggests. But Remainers are no different to Leavers in how attached they are to their local community. And people reporting higher level of civic participation or those who are more trusting are actually less supportive of Brexit. Our findings suggest that the dichotomy between cosmopolitan Anywheres and communitarian Somewheres is a misleading one. Cosmopolitan Anywheres are just as communitarian as Somewheres, if not more so., (© 2021 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Having an Anglican affiliation is known to be associated with support for leaving the European Union (EU) in Britain. Religiosity, conceived as strength of religious attachment, has received comparatively little treatment. We investigate religiosity via electoral, household, and attitudinal surveys, distinguishing the effects of "behaving" and "believing." The association between religiosity and EU Referendum vote choice and position is identified before and after inclusion of values, attitudinal, and civic engagement measures. Consistent with established findings, in socio-structural models Anglicans are more likely to support Brexit than religious Nones. More frequent church attendance is associated with being more pro-Remain. The Anglican effect is primarily mediated by anti-immigrant attitudes, authoritarianism, and salience of ethnic identity, suggesting a Christian nationalist aspect to Leave support. The attendance effect is mediated by warmer attitudes toward immigrants, and social capital. Notably, those exhibiting stronger orthodox belief tend to feature a stronger attachment to "Leave," with this partly mediated by authoritarianism. To evaluate the net effect of religion on civic life, we should pay more attention to the cultural content of religious beliefs, and how they structure other values and attitudes., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2020.)

While much attention has been devoted to measuring levels of social mobility over time, less attention has been given to the possibility of changing pathways to social mobility. This paper examines pathways from social origins to socio-economic destinations in midlife for two British cohorts, born in 1958 and 1970 respectively, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). We address the roles of cognitive attainment, private schooling and educational attainment in mediating the link between social origins and destinations. Have these mechanisms become more or less important over time, in a context of structural change in the state schooling system and educational expansion? We find that private schools displayed greater academic selectivity and an increased link to high levels of educational attainment for the younger cohort. Essentially, private schools adapted to changing circumstances, becoming more academically selective and less socially selective, and more focused on educational credentials. Childhood social origins were less strongly linked to childhood cognitive scores in the younger cohort, but cognitive scores were also more weakly linked to educational attainment for this cohort. We also find a decreased association between social origins and educational attainment for the younger cohort. While the finding that educational inequalities weakened over this time period is positive, the lack of a corresponding reduction in the overall link between social origins and destinations suggests that reducing educational inequalities was not sufficient to increase social mobility when accompanied by countervailing changes in the role of private schools., (© 2020 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Research in social stratification has shown that children from working-class backgrounds tend to obtain substantially lower levels of educational attainment and lower labor market positions than children from higher social class backgrounds. However, we still know relatively little about the micro-level processes that account for this empirical regularity. Our study examines the roles of two individual-level characteristics-cognitive ability and locus of control-in mediating the effect of individuals' parental class background on their educational attainment and social class position in Britain. We find that cognitive ability mediates only about 35% of the total parental class effect on educational attainment and only about 20% of the total parental class effect on respondents' social class position, net of their educational attainment. These findings contradict existing claims that differences in the life chances of children from different social class backgrounds are largely due to differences in cognitive ability. Moreover, we find that although individuals' locus of control plays some role in mediating the parental class effect, its role is substantially smaller than the mediating role of cognitive ability. We measure individuals' social class positions at different points in their careers-at labor market entry and at occupational maturity-and find that the mediating roles of cognitive ability and locus of control are remarkably stable across individuals' working lives., (© 2020 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

We use data from a large scale and nationally representative survey to evaluate two narratives about the social bases of Brexit. The first narrative sees Brexit as a revolt of the economically left-behinds. The second narrative attributes Brexit to the resurgence of an English nationalism. There is some, albeit not always consistent, evidence that people in relative poverty or those living in areas that have seen greater Chinese import penetration are slightly more pro-Leave. People living in economically deprived neighborhoods are not more pro-Brexit. Using the Weberian class-status distinction, it is social status, not social class, which stratifies Brexit support. Individuals for whom being British is important are more pro-Leave. But those who see themselves as British rather than English, and those reporting omnivorous cultural consumption are less supportive of Brexit. Overall, there is empirical support for both narratives. But the weight of the evidence suggests a strong cultural dimension in Brexit support., (© 2020 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

While most scholarship in the sociology of insurance has focused on the making of insurance risk by investigating mechanisms of pooling and spreading, this article examines insurers' management of financial uncertainty. Based on a large corpus of written sources and 44 semi-structured oral history interviews, this article seeks to describe and explain a shift in how financial uncertainty is dealt with in British life insurance, away from traditional multipolar arrangements revolving around actuarial prudence and discretion, towards bipolar arrangements that rely on explicit risk quantification and the logic of risk-based capital to "individualise" financial risk. The article identifies two factors that were key in bringing about this shift: first, the competitive dynamics that unfolded with the emergence of challenger "unit-linked" insurers in the 1960s, and, second, changes in the professional ecology, as manifested by the changing relations between the actuarial profession and insurance supervisors., (© 2020 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This article examines Channel "de-radicalization" interventions, which take place on individuals suspected of having the potential to commit terrorist crimes. Situated within critical security studies, the article explores the British Prevent programme by utilizing primary interviews with hard-to-reach Channel mentors and senior Prevent officials. Following the work of anticipatory risk-governance scholarship, this research illuminates the three processes of risk-visibilization (how an individual becomes sufficiently "seen" as harbouring risk that they are offered Channel mentorship), risk-calculation (how practitioners negotiate supposed riskiness), and risk-knowing (how practitioners "know" risks they observe). It demonstrates how the practice of preemptive counter-terrorism is subsumed inherently by-even relies upon-subjectivity and human prejudice, and fundamental disagreements between practitioners. Through substantial empirical contribution on the phenomenon of Channel interventions, the discussion highlights ultimately that the algorithmic rationale of preemptive risk-spotting normalizes the suspicion of banal and everyday behaviors, precisely because such interventions are ultimately deployed through worst-case imaginations., (© 2020 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science 2020.)

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., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

The increased comparative research on perceptions of public welfare deservingness studies the extent to which different subgroups of citizens are deemed worthy or unworthy of receiving help from the welfare state. The concept of deservingness criteria plays a crucial role in this research, as it theorizes a universal heuristic that citizens apply to rank people in terms of their welfare deservingness. Due to the mainly quantitative nature of the research and despite the indisputable progress it has made, the subjective existence and actual application of these deservingness criteria remain a bit of a black box. What criteria of deservingness do citizens actually apply, and how do they apply them? This article opens the black box of welfare deservingness and sheds light on the nature and practice of deservingness criteria. Empirically, the paper explores how the deservingness of immigrants is discussed and established within 20 focus groups conducted in Slovenia, Denmark, UK, and Norway in 2016 with a total of 160 participants. All 20 focus groups discussed the welfare deservingness of immigrants based on similar vignette stimuli. Our analysis shows that (1) deservingness criteria are used both to construct images of target groups and as normative yardsticks; (2) deservingness criteria do not work independently of each other, but rather co-function in specific hybridized discourses; and (3) the moral logic of deservingness is supplemented by alternative moral logics, at least in the case of migrants., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Nostalgia had a prominent place in the Brexit Referendum campaign, epitomized by Nigel Farage carrying around with him an old-fashioned blue British passport on the campaign trail. In this paper, we seek to examine British attitudes towards the past through a new survey instrument administered online in July and August 2018 (N = 3,000). We empirically establish two dimensions of nostalgia that are differentially associated with political preferences. We conclude that it is the substance of the nostalgia that matters, not the looking towards the past per se., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Social networking is a digital phenomenon embraced by billions worldwide. Use of online social platforms has the potential to generate a number of benefits including to well-being from enhanced social connectedness and social capital accumulation, but is also associated with several negative behaviours and impacts. Employing a life-course perspective, this paper explores social networking use and its relationship with measures of subjective well-being. Large-scale UK panel data from wave 3 (2011-12) and 6 (2014-15) of Understanding Society reveals that social network users are on average younger, aged under 25, but that rising use is reported across the life-course including into old age. Probit, multinomial logistic, and ANCOVA and change-score estimations reveal that membership, and greater use, of social networks is associated with higher levels of overall life satisfaction. However, heavy use of social networking sites has negative impacts, reflected in reductions in subjective well-being. Socio-economic disadvantage may drive these impacts among young (in education), unemployed and economically inactive heavy SNS users., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

The symbolic value of being recruited by a high status multinational company likely represents an important marker of distinction. For the first time, a unique Destinations of Leavers in Higher Education (DLHE) data-set is used here to model entry to elite multinational company in finance, accountancy and consultancy sectors among graduates of different social origins, universities, degree subjects and with different degree classifications. From a sample of 11,755 graduates working across these three sectors, we examine what predicts entry to 31 leading firms and then examine pay hierarchies among the 3,260 graduates working for these companies using random-effects models. At first glance, significantly, we find that elite recruits come from a much broader range of universities than might be imagined. However, a closer look at the highest paid graduates within these firms reveals more familiar patterns of social and institutional stratification. We argue that these patterns likely reflect the nature of work undertaken by graduates in these elite firms, with institutional and social origins of graduates differing according to the particular track taken in what are likely to be highly differentiated graduate recruitment schemes., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

In the UK's stratified HE system the question of who is able to access the most selective and prestigious universities is fraught with issues of fairness. This paper explores how decision-makers in Oxford's undergraduate admissions process construct norms of fairness and how such norms inform their reflexive considerations and actions around admissions decisions. Framing such norms as multiple institutional habituses, the paper considers how decision-makers compromise and negotiate between institutional habituses in tension. Further, it presents an augmented conception of institutional habitus - the relational institutional habitus - which offers a conceptual tool to make sense of the existence of multiple contested institutional norms and their partial and fragile reconciliation in institutional action., (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

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., (© 2022 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

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., (© 2021 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This paper draws on the concepts and tools of Pierre Bourdieu to construct a comprehensive model of the contemporary British "food space." It uses multiple correspondence analysis to unearth a space structured in two key dimensions revolving around the lean and the rich. A host of supplementary variables are available to examine the relationship, or homology, between food tastes and broader alimentary dispositions, including orientations toward shopping, ethics and cooking. Indicators of social position reveal the structuring of the space by economic and cultural capital as well as gender, but also, updating and nuancing Bourdieu's own model for 1970s' France, by age, region, ethnicity and religion. Finally, the paper examines the relationship between position in the food space and physical, mental and existential wellbeing, demonstrating that orientation toward the less healthy and the less rich, corresponding with few resources, is, in some cases, accompanied by not only hunger and deprivation but profound worry and misery., (© 2021 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

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., (© 2020 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Robert Fine was among the most original social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years, and the aim of this paper is to offer a first systematic assessment of his intellectual contribution. There are sound intellectual reasons to explore Fine's scholarship. He maintained a problematic relation with mainstream sociology and, against the reduction of sociology to questions of method, culture, or class, he argued that sociologists must continue to ask difficult normative questions as part of the social world they ought to explain. And there are also pressing political concerns that justify a reconsideration of his writings. Global politics is currently marked by a populist wave that decries the very ideas and values that were central to Fine's social theory: the need to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, the politics of cosmopolitan solidarity, and the significance of antisemitism and its relationships with different forms of authoritarian politics. My main argument is that there is a dialectics of universality that drives forward Fine's intellectual project. By this, I mean that a universalistic idea of humanity-an all-inclusive conception of all human beings-is the most important normative intuition of modern times. This idea of humanity moves forward in history through a dual process of emancipation and domination: successful forms of social, legal, and political inclusion help make visible previous dynamics of exclusion but may also create or recreate discriminatory practices. Building on the work of French historian Michael Löwy on heterodox Jewish thinkers, I explain the three main tenets of Fine's work: (a) his reconstruction of critical social theory; (b) the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity; and (c) the significance and main features of modern antisemitism., (© 2020 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This paper joins the debate on the formation of territorial stigma by uncovering the existence of a form of "foundational stigma" that preceded place-based stigma of the era of advanced marginality. I show that not only were the traces of stigma present prior to the era of advanced marginality but that these early traces facilitate later forms of stigma by providing the necessary foundations upon which adhesive and detrimental stigma was operationalized. Following a critical discourse analysis approach, this paper examines coverage in the British press of Toxteth, Liverpool between 1900 and 1981 as a paradigmatic case study to show that this primitive stigma existed in three key ways: relating to inter-community strife, to crime, and to substandard housing conditions. These traces of stigma laid the foundations for later forms of stigma based on the presence of the poor, violent, deviant other that would be operationalized by dominant voices during the era of advanced marginality., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

The current paper examines terrorism as a special form of moralistic violence, with several key features that distinguish such behaviour from other types of violence. The theory of lethal moralism highlights the importance of social polarization, characterized by vast differences in social space and inequality between adversaries as crucial to explaining deadly terrorist attacks. Where the differences are more permanent or chronic - and the groups in question define and justify their existence specifically in contradistinction to 'other' groups - then the polarization intensifies and attacks tend to be more lethal. In contrast, groups that appeal to broader audiences or the general public as potential allies more often use non-lethal terrorism to their strategic advantage. The study examines the United States and the United Kingdom to classify each of more than 8,000 attacks between 1970 and 2017 in terms of their ideological orientations. The evidence highlights the arc of terrorism in relation to different types of groups, as well as confirms the more lethal nature of terrorism linked especially to radical Islam, right-wing religious extremists, hate groups, ethno-nationalist sectarian violence, and anti-government anarchists. Yet apart from the extensive use of terrorism associated with 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland, the majority of terrorist attacks in the US and the UK have not produced deaths. Most terrorism instead has been perpetrated by groups aiming to rally support for a general cause and has been far less deadly on balance. The implications of these findings are discussed with a view toward developing more powerful explanatory models that focus on the socio-cultural contexts and justification frameworks that inspire extremism and the use of lethal moralism to settle disputes., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

It is becoming increasingly common to hear life scientists say that high quality life science research relies upon high quality laboratory animal care. However, the idea that animal care is a crucial part of scientific knowledge production is at odds with previous social science and historical scholarship regarding laboratory animals. How are we to understand this discrepancy? To begin to address this question, this paper seeks to disentangle the values of scientists in identifying animal care as important to the production of high quality scientific research. To do this, we conducted a survey of scientists working in the United Kingdom who use animals in their research. The survey found that being British is associated with thinking that animal care is a crucial part of conducting high quality science. To understand this finding, we draw upon the concept of 'civic epistemologies' (Jasanoff 2005; Prainsack 2006) and argue that 'animals' and 'care' in Britain may converge in taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes good scientific knowledge. These ideas travel through things like state regulations or the editorial policies of science journals, but do not necessarily carry the embodied civic epistemology of 'animals' and 'science' from which such modes of regulating laboratory animal welfare comes., (© 2019 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

It has been well established that those working in the sex industry are at various risks of violence and crime depending on where they sell sex and the environments in which they work. What sociological research has failed to address is how crime and safety have been affected by the dynamic changing nature of sex work given the dominance of the internet and digital technologies, including the development of new markets such as webcamming. This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet-based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet-based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt, building on our article in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007. We present the concept of 'blended safety repertoires' to explain how sex workers, particularly independent escorts, are using a range of traditional techniques alongside digitally enabled strategies to keep themselves safe. We contribute a deeper understanding of why sex workers who work indoors rarely report crimes to the police, reflecting the dilemmas experienced. Our findings highlight how legal and policy changes which seek to ban online adult services advertising and sex work related content within online spaces would have direct impact on the safety strategies online sex workers employ and would further undermine their safety. These findings occur in a context where aspects of sex work are quasi-criminalized through the brothel keeping legislation. We conclude that the legal and policy failure to recognize sex work as a form of employment, contributes to the stigmatization of sex work and prevents individuals working together. Current UK policy disallows a framework for employment laws and health and safety standards to regulate sex work, leaving sex workers in the shadow economy, their safety at risk in a quasi-legal system. In light of the strong evidence that the internet makes sex work safer, we argue that decriminalisation as a rights based model of regulation is most appropriate., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

This paper examines change in school-age children's (8-16 years) time use in the United Kingdom between 1975 and 2015. Over this period, concerns for children's safety, technological change, and increased emphasis on success in school are widely argued to have altered children's daily lives, leading for example to less time outdoors, more time in screen-based activities, and more time focused on education. Using data from three national time use surveys collected in 1974-5, 2000-01 and 2014-15, this paper explores the extent to which these arguments reflect actual change in how children spend their time throughout the day. The results show that between 1975 and 2015 children increased their time at home, and spent more time in screen-based activities and doing homework. Decreases in time in out-of-home activities were concentrated in time in unstructured play, partially offset by increased time in sport. A decomposition of trends revealed that, despite a narrowing of the gender gap in time in housework, gender remains a significant factor determining many aspects of children's time use. In contrast, the significance of age declined in most leisure activities, with the exception of screen-based activities where significant age differences emerged in 2000 and widened further in 2015., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

This paper examines the precarious working lives of 'emerging' composers attempting to build a career in the world of new classical music in the UK. This topic is approached by considering the 'composition opportunity', success in which is seen as an important element in 'making it' in this sphere. We argue that such schemes in fact manifest a crucial tension in the nature of artistic labour, and are, at the very least, problematic in their function as conduits towards full professional identity. They may instead act to maintain the precarious working situation of composers in a neoliberal age. The working lives of artists are all too rarely illuminated, and new music composers are no exception; this survey of 47 emerging composers is the largest study of such individuals in the UK., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

The aim of this paper is to develop and apply a framework to explore how moralities of consumption are constituted in and through markets. Using the case of ready-made foods, this paper argues moral economies are comprised through interactions between micro-, meso- and macro-level processes in the form of instituted systems of provision, state regulation, collective food customs promoted though media, NGOs and lifestyle practitioners, and the everyday reflections of consumers. Building on a theoretical framework developed to understand the moral economy of work and employment (Bolton and Laaser 2013), this paper explores how markets for ready-made food are incessantly negotiated in the context of moral ideas about cooking, femininity and individual responsibility. It focuses on 'new' market innovations of fresh ready-to-cook meal solutions and explores how these products are both a response to moralizing discourses about cooking 'properly', as well as an intervention into the market that offers opportunities for new moral identities to be performed. Using data gathered from interviews with food manufacturers and consumers, I advocate for a multi-layered perspective that captures the dynamic interplay between consumers, markets and moralities of consumption., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the way in which cognitive and educational attainment mediate the link between social origins and elite social class destinations in mid-life. Using the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), we assess the roles of a range of pathways through which educational advantage may lead to occupational attainment: cognitive development; private and selective secondary schools; school level qualifications; and higher education, including institution and field of study. Whereas past research has shown a residual direct effect of social origins on class destinations, we find that, once a sufficiently detailed picture of educational attainment is taken into account, education fully explains the link between social origins and top social class destinations. In contrast, the gap between men and women in achieving top social class positions is in no part accounted for by education., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

Our sense of belonging rarely stands still, yet the research literature has hitherto paid little attention to the temporal nature of belonging. Based on an analysis of 62 Mass Observation Project (MOP) accounts written by people living in the UK aged from their 20s to their 90s, this paper argues that as people age, how they locate belonging in time shifts. This has to do with changing concerns related to belonging, but also to metaphysical issues of temporality and mortality, namely how people experience their own finite lifetime. The paper thus offers an illustrative example of how time can be empirically researched in sociology, with a particular focus on the important role that the future plays in how people construct their 'functional present' (Mead ). The central argument put forward is that time itself can be an important source of belonging, but one that is unequally accessible to people of different ages because of contemporary cultural scripts that present life as a linear progression into the future and construct the future as a more meaningful temporal horizon than the past., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

Much of the literature on the urban middle classes describes processes of both affiliation (often to the localities) and disaffiliation (often from some of the non-middle-class residents). In this paper, we consider this situation from a different position, drawing on research exploring whether and how children and adults living in diverse localities develop friendships with those different to themselves in terms of social class and ethnicity. This paper focuses on the interviews with the ethnically diverse, but predominantly white British, middle-class parent participants, considering their attitudes towards social and cultural difference. We emphasize the importance of highlighting inequalities that arise from social class and its intersection with ethnicity in analyses of complex urban populations. The paper's contribution is, first, to examine processes of clustering amongst the white British middle-class parents, particularly in relation to social class. Second, we contrast this process, and its moments of reflection and unease, with the more deliberate and purposeful efforts of one middle-class, Bangladeshi-origin mother who engages in active labour to facilitate relationships across social and ethnic difference., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

The debates relating to social class and whether it is still a useful concept in describing a lived reality of the British population has never been far away from media, political and academic dispute. Thatcher's Britain throughout the 1980s attempted to dilute class meaning with what was called 'a home owning democracy' and thus end class collective politics through easily available credit for the working class while simultaneously attacking trade union organization, recruitment and political action. During the late 1990s and into the noughties a 'New Labour' administration attempted to exacerbate the end of class politics through an agenda of a 'cultural distinction' to class identity. Class struggle, class politics and class identity is embedded deep within the cultural norms practices, and history of British democracy. Consequently it is difficult if not impossible to prise class inequality in the UK away from and out of national, local and personal politics (Savage et al. 2015: 393-8). This paper focuses upon the sense that class politics, and cultural class distinction, within the UK had the biggest influence in determining a working-class 'Leave Vote' in the 2016 referendum within the UK. This paper explores accounts and narratives from working-class 'leave' voters though an ethnographic study of the political and social viewpoints of working-class communities of East London, and of ex-mining towns of Nottinghamshire. Framing into fuller context the anger and apathy of being 'left out', arguing that being 'left out' has been part of working-class political narratives for over 30 years. Going beyond frustration and apathy, a significant part of the narrative of working people was of 'not existing', suggesting certain important linkages with ongoing debates about new ways of conceptualizing class differences and class structures., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

This paper considers the contemporary significance of white racism and its association with nationalist sentiment amongst a cohort late middle aged white Britons, using survey responses and qualitative interviews from the 1958 National Child Development Study. We have shown that although overt racism is very limited, a substantial minority of white Britons display ambivalent feelings which have the potential to be mobilised in racist directions. We argue against the view that disadvantaged white working class respondents are especially xenophobic, and show that racist views are not strongly associated with social position. In exploring the clustering of different nationalist and racist sentiments amongst economic and cultural elites, and comparing these with 'disenfranchised' respondents with little economic and cultural capital, we show that it is actually the elite who are most likely to articulate 'imperial racism'. By contrast, the 'disenfranchised' articulate a kind of anti-establishment nationalism which is not strongly racist. We also show that the elite are strongly internally divided, with a substantial number of the cultural elite being strongly anti-racist and committed to multi-culturalism, so generating strong internal factionalism between elite positions. Our paper therefore underscores how intensifying inequalities have facilitated the volatility and variability of nationalist and racist sentiment., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2013.)

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., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2013.)

Based on a recent empirical project on 'the Bengal diaspora', the paper explores the construction and contestation of meanings around the iconic East London street, Brick Lane. Taking the 2006 protests around the film Brick Lane as its starting point, the paper draws on original interviews conducted in 2008 with a range of Bengali community representatives, to examine the narratives of space, community and belonging that emerge around the idea of Brick Lane as the 'cultural heartland' of the British Bangladeshi community. By exploring the representation, production and contestation of 'social space' through everyday practices, the paper engages with and contests the representation of minority ethnic 'communities' in the context of contemporary multicultural London and examines the process of 'claiming' and 'making' space in East London. In so doing, the paper contributes to a critical tradition that challenges essentialising and pathologizing accounts of ethnic communities and racialized spaces, or that places them outside of broader social and historical processes - redolent, for example, in contemporary discussions about 'parallel lives' or 'the clash of civilizations'. By contrast, this paper views social space as made through movement and narration, with a particular emphasis on the social agency of local Bengali inhabitants and the multiple meanings that emerge from within this 'imagined community'. However, rather than simply stressing the unfinished and processual nature of spatial meanings, the paper insists on the historical, embodied and affective dimensions of such meaning making, and a reckoning with the broader social and political landscape within which such meanings take shape. The focus on Brick Lane provides an empirically rich, geographically and historically located lens through which to explore the complex role of ethnicity as a marker of social space and of spatial practices of resistance and identity. By exploring Bengali Brick Lane through its narratives of past, present and future, these stories attest to the symbolic and emotional importance of such spaces, and to their complex imaginings., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2011.)

Children start school with differing levels of skills. Thus, children of different social origin have different probabilities of educational success right from the start of their school career. This paper analyses how the gap in language abilities of children with different social backgrounds develops from age three to five. A focus lies on the question whether pre-school education can help to close this gap. The data of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) show that children's score on a standardized vocabulary test strongly depends on their parents' education. These social differences remain stable or even increase slightly over the two-year period. Using fixed effect models, it is demonstrated that children of higher educated parents can improve their vocabulary more strongly than children whose parents have a lower educational level. Participation in an early education institution positively affects the vocabulary development of children with lower educated parents while there is no significant pre-school effect for children of higher educated parents. The results indicate that pre-school attendance does not lead to a catching-up process of children with lower educated parents. But without pre-school attendance, the gap between children of higher and lower educated parents widens even further., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2011.)

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.

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.

This paper sets out an approach to the analysis of political power in terms of problematics of government. It argues against an overvaluation of the 'problem of the State' in political debate and social theory. A number of conceptual tools are suggested for the analysis of the many and varied alliances between political and other authorities that seek to govern economic activity, social life and individual conduct. Modern political rationalities and governmental technologies are shown to be intrinsically linked to developments in knowledge and to the powers of expertise. The characteristics of liberal problematics of government are investigated, and it is argued that they are dependent upon technologies for 'governing at a distance', seeking to create locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy. The analysis is exemplified through an investigation of welfarism as a mode of 'social' government. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of neo-liberalism which demonstrates that the analytical language structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political power.(1).

This paper draws on the experience of researching British South Asian women's lives in London as a female British Asian researcher to explore how cultural commonality and difference is shaped by agency and interaction in the research process. It examines these issues through a discussion of how the shared cultural identity of the researcher and the interviewees emerged as both a point of commonality and difference in the research process; with the researcher being ;positioned' in terms of both as a result of the interviewees' agency in interpreting their cultural commonality. In particular, issues of 'Indianness' and religion emerged as points on which interviewees exercised agency and interpreted the researcher's cultural identity. This was the basis on which they claimed commonality or difference and this assessment consequently impacted on their interaction with the researcher. The article suggests that more attention needs to be given to how assumptions made by interviewees regarding the cultural identity of the researcher through their agency and interaction in the research process shapes interview dynamics.