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Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers' life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within-family processes., (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Drawing from theory on the "co-production" of science and society, this paper provides an account of trajectories in US climatology, roughly from the 1850s to 1920, the period during which climatology emerged as an organized branch of meteorology and government administration. The historical narrative traces the development of climatology both as a professional/institutional project and as a component of a larger governmental logic. Historical analysis of climatologists' scientific texts, maps, and social organization within government provides a sociological explanation for the emergent "stabilization" of climate as a geographic-statistical category. Climatic stability, defined by the view that climate is unchanging, was advanced over this period in a way that linked the interests and practices of climatologists to actors invested in facilitating and administrating commercial agriculture and trade. I position the logic of climatology and the discourse of climatic stability historically, with reference to prior concern with climate change and, in recent decades, efforts to govern global warming through geoengineering climatic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economics frequently serves as an advisory discipline to policymakers, bolstered in part by its claims to a unified intellectual framework and high disciplinary consensus. Recent research challenges this perspective, providing empirical evidence that economists' professional opinions are divided by ideological commitments to either free markets on one hand or state intervention on the other. We investigate the influence of ideology in economics by examining the relation between economists' ideological commitments and the certainty with which they express their expert opinions. To examine this relationship, we analyze data from the Initiative on Global Markets Economic Experts Panel, a unique survey of 51 economists at seven elite American universities. Our results suggest that economists with ideologically patterned views report higher levels of certainty in their opinions than their less ideologically consistent peers, but this boost in confidence is limited to topics that closely pertain to the free market versus interventionism divide., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This study inquires whether a new structurally dispossessed class is developing in the United States. The new class proposition is derived from social theory and operationalized by two empirical characteristics: not in the labor force (NILF) and family income below poverty. The primary data source is the Current Population Survey over the years from 1968 to 2018, and threshold demographic criteria for class development is specified as increasing size and diversity. Because evidence is found to support the latter criterion but not the former, the proposition that a new class is developing is partially rejected. The analysis finds that new social components are joining the NILF/impoverished including men, Hispanics, college graduates, and young adults. Second, that the NILF/impoverished are politically active in terms of electoral participation, and no more likely than the total electorate to have voted for a populist Presidential candidate in 2016. NILF/impoverished recipiency of state transfers varies over time, increasing through the Great Recession, then receding. The implications of the investigation are discussed in terms of the likelihood that the NILF/impoverished will generate new forms of political opposition to the rule of capital., (© 2020 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Prior accounts of the experimenter's regress in laboratory testing are set against the background of a relatively stable institutional context. Even if the tools are new or the object of investigation is unknown, participating entities are named, a certain degree of funding is presumed, and an organization exists to conduct the test. In this paper, I argue that this background assumption obscures the importance of institutional and organizational context to the sociology of testing. I analyze ethnographic data gathered among a NASA team whose funding is uncertain, whose mission organization is not yet established, and whose object of investigation is inaccessible. In what I characterize as "ontological flexibility," I reveal how scientists shift their accounts of object agency in response to changes in their institutional environment. As they describe the moon as "uncooperative" or "multiple" while they make appeals to institutions at various stages of support in their exploration projects, this reveals the presence of an "institutional regress": a previously overlooked aspect of the sociology of testing., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

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., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Cultural consumption is often viewed as a form of embodied cultural capital which can be converted into economic rewards (e.g., earnings) because such practices increase the likelihood of moving into more advantaged social positions. However, quantitative evidence supporting this theory remains uncertain because it is often unable to rule out alternative explanations. Cultural consumption appears to influence hiring decisions in some elite firms, in both the US and the UK, but it is unclear whether these processes are applicable to other professional occupations and other labour market processes, such as promotions. We examine these processes using data from Understanding Society, an individual‐level panel survey conducted in the UK, allowing us to explore whether cultural consumption predicts future earnings, upward social mobility and promotions. People who consume a larger number of cultural activities are more likely to earn higher wages in the future, to be upwardly socially mobile, and to be promoted. Cultural consumption, then, can function as cultural capital in some labour market settings, potentially contributing to the reproduction of income inequality between generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Legal recursivity" is a concept introduced by socio‐legal scholars to capture the progressive elaboration of transnational rules through policy linkages at the international and domestic levels, and the associated jurisdictional expansion of international institutions to new policy areas. Recursivity can take many forms, and this article introduces the concept of "antagonistic recursivity" to capture a dual process of recursive legal innovation and antagonistic obstruction by the same policy actors. The article shows how such antagonistic recursivity worked in the case of the global fight against private nuclear proliferators after the 2003 revelations about the reach of the A. Q. Khan network. In the case under study, antagonistic recursivities took the form of executive‐driven innovation in rule‐making and simultaneous subversion of the same rules by the executive most implicated in the new cycle of policy innovation: the United States government. This paradox can be explained in the following manner. Antagonistic recursivity, the article demonstrates, is likely to emerge when legal rules of global governance have already been previously defined in an opaque manner, so as to help hegemons follow multiple foreign policy goals: the subversion of the most recent policy innovations is then the unfortunate result of attempts to hide prior cover‐ups rather than a purposeful violation of new rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on Alondra Nelson's lecture published in the "British Journal of Sociology," which builds on her seminal acclaimed monograph The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome. Topics include reconciliation projects and the ontological choreography of race, and Nelson considers how genetic ancestry tests have become entangled in reconciliation projects involving a group of universities in the U.S.

Despite much positive change in the post civil rights era, U.S. notions of racism and white supremacy remain powerful elements of American culture. The adaptability and enduring power of these forces can be seen in the emergence of a new historical epoch best describe as the era of Laissez Faire Racism. Prevalent attitudes among white Americans, certain theoretical arguments and hypotheses in American sociology, as well the election of Donald Trump rest upon the on-going operation of racism. In particular, I attribute Trump's electoral success to three critical dilemmas of race that defined contours of the 2016 presidential election: (1) worsening economic inequality in the presence of rapidly changing ethno-racial demography; (2) intensified political partisanship in the presence of well-institutionalized racially coded campaign strategies and rhetoric; and (3) the failure of the Clinton campaign to simultaneously champion the interests of working and middle class families and galvanize the previously powerful multiracial Obama coalition. I speculate on how to forge more effective multiracial coalitions in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sociology in U.S. and mentions apartheid and slavery in the country. Topics discussed include working class in U.S., sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, his book "Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880" and democracy. Other topics which includes abolition, history of sociology and social change are also discussed.

The article focuses on sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. Topics discussed include American sociology, racism in U.S. and black sociologists. Other topics which includes academic writing, social inquiry and slavery in U.S. are also discussed. In addition, topics such as book "The Philadelphia Negro" by Du Bois is also mentioned.

Combining moral philosophy with sociological theory to build on themes introduced in Hall and Lamont's Successful Societies (2009), the paper outlines a distinctive perspective. It holds that a necessary condition of successful societies is that decision-makers base their decisions on a high level of attentiveness (concern and comprehension) towards subjectively valued and morally legitimate forms of life. Late modern societies consist of a plurality of forms of life, each providing grounds for what Alasdair MacIntyre has called internal goods-valued and morally valuable practices. The status of such goods is examined, and distinctions are drawn between their manifest and latent, and transposable and situationally specific, characteristics. We integrate this refined idea of internal goods into a developed conception of habitus that is both morally informed and situationally embedded. The sociological approach of strong structuration theory (SST) is employed to demonstrate how this conception of habitus can guide the critique of decision-making that damages internal goods. We identify the most pervasive and invidious forms of damaging decision-making in contemporary societies as those involving excessive forms of instrumental reasoning. We argue that our developed conception of habitus, anchored in the collectively valued practices of specific worlds, can be a powerful focus for resistance. Accounts of scholarship in higher education and of the white working class in America illustrate the specificities of singular, particular, social worlds and illuminate critical challenges raised by the perspective we advocate., (© 2019 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Globalization poses many challenges for national cultural unity, especially in Europe. Some doubt whether national cultures will be able to survive, but there are many counter-trends pushing to maintain national cultural unity. I analyse the dual trends of global diversity and maintaining unity through an everyday manifestation of French culture: elementary school lunches. French school lunch programmes are part of the nation-building process because they are designed to teach students how to eat, which is especially important in France where the art of gastronomy is a key source of identity and pride. I analyse cultural influences on over 11,000 school lunch menu items from eight municipalities across two French regions. I also conduct in-depth face-to-face interviews with the people who design and approve school lunch menus. My inquiry is guided by three key questions. First, to what extent are foreign influences included? Second, does openness to foreign influences vary across different parts of France? Finally, how are foreign cultures represented? My results suggest that foreign cultures are deployed to nationalize difference. The limited foreign influences that appear in school lunches are strategically chosen to appeal to and to educate students, but in a way that reinforces the centrality of traditional French cultural norms. This article contributes to our understanding of the tension between national culture and a globalizing world., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

Older people have been overlooked in recent debates over the relationship between age, class and culture despite their prevalence and the conceptual questions they raise. Seeking to bridge mainstream class analysis with debates in social gerontology, especially via a shared turn to Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology, this paper draws on survey data from the US to examine not only the class position of older people but their internal social and cultural differentiation. I use geometric data analysis to construct a model of the class system, locate older people within it and then explore differences among older people. I then proceed to compare the cultural symbolisations of social positions among older people to those of the larger sample. The core structures of social and cultural differentiation among older people are roughly homologous with those of the broader sample, but there are also notable differences and even inversions pointing toward the specificity - and autonomy - of ageing as a principle of difference and practice., (© 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.)

When the Arab Spring gave way to demonstrations in Syria in 2011, the Kurds in the country were also full of hope. While they were going into the streets, the Kurdish political parties were debating what their people should do and offering competing visions for the future. Then in July 2012, the regime unexpectedly withdrew its forces from the Kurdish regions (Rojava). Suddenly, a revolutionary situation emerged in Rojava: a mobilized population and several political parties claiming leadership and offering competing political projects for a new society. Among these parties, only the Democratic Union Party (PYD) managed to move into the power vacuum and establish its control over large areas. Its rivals were unable to stop the rapid rise of this relatively young organization and fast erosion of their own base. How did the PYD manage to become the dominant organization even though it had rarely drawn attention before the civil war? This question raises the larger problem of how a revolutionary organization becomes the dominant one among competitors. Even though multiple organizations competing in a single revolution is a recurrent phenomenon, we still lack a comprehensive framework specifically focusing on this issue. In this paper, I argue for an approach based on legitimation: for people to follow a certain organization over others, they should see it as a legitimate leader. Bringing together the insights of the political and organizational legitimacy literatures, I identify three processes of legitimation for revolutionary organizations: ideological/normative congruence, effective organizational capacity, and accumulation of prestige. Drawing upon participant observation and 30 in-depth interviews with Kurdish individuals collected during fieldwork in Iraq, Germany, and the United States between 2016 and 2019, I demonstrate that the PYD has outperformed its contenders and managed to legitimate its leadership through these three processes., (© 2021 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Is the test result positive or negative? Tests that occur in labs and doctors' offices pose specific questions to try to obtain specific information. But what happens in the social world when these tests never see the inside of a lab or doctor's office, and instead they are used in a house, in a Walmart bathroom, or in a dormitory bathroom stall? Putting the diagnosis aside, what does the presence of these tests do to social life? This paper examines one such test, the home pregnancy test, and specifically, its use in contemporary intimate life of people who do not want to be pregnant. Pregnancy tests test for pregnancy. But what else is the pregnancy test putting to the test? To investigate this, I spent 8 years studying American pregnancy tests using a qualitative mixed methods approach. This paper draws on some of my research materials, specifically, 85 life history interviews. Each participant was asked to recall, in full, all of their experiences with home pregnancy tests throughout their lives, resulting in well over 300 narratives of home pregnancy test usage which I qualitatively analyzed. I find that more than just a test for a pregnancy, the use of the home pregnancy test is a test of roles, relationships, and responsibilities in social life. These findings suggest implications for social life as more biomedical tests move out of the purview of the medical establishment., (©2020 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

In this paper, we test two mechanisms through which cultural capital might affect educational performance: (a) teachers misinterpreting cultural capital as signals of academic brilliance and (b) cultural capital fostering skills in children that enhance educational performance. We analyse data from the ECLS-K and ECLS-K:2011 from the United States and focus on three aspects of children's cultural capital: participation in performing arts, reading interest and participation in athletics and clubs. We find that (1) none of the three aspects of cultural capital that we consider affects teachers' evaluations of children's academic skills; (2) reading interest has a direct positive effect on educational performance; and (3) the direct effect of reading interest on educational performance does not depend on schooling context. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis that cultural capital operates via signals about academic brilliance. Instead, they suggest that cultural capital fosters skills in children that enhance educational performance. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings., (© 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.)

This paper contributes to the study of social change by considering boundary work as a dimension of cultural change. Drawing on the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of 73 formal speeches made by Donald Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign, we argue that his political rhetoric, which led to his presidential victory, addressed the white working class's concern with their declining position in the national pecking order. He addressed this group's concern by raising their moral status, that is, by (1) emphatically describing them as hard-working Americans who are victims of globalization; (2) voicing their concerns about 'people above' (professionals, the rich, and politicians); (3) drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, and Muslims; (4) presenting African Americans and (legal) Hispanic Americans as workers who also deserve jobs; (5) stressing the role of working-class men as protectors of women and LGBTQ people. This particular case study of the role of boundary work in political rhetoric provides a novel, distinctively sociological approach for capturing dynamics of social change., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)