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Research on family history argues it performs the task of anchoring a sense of 'self' through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied 'identity-work'. This paper draws on a small-scale qualitative study to think further on the identity-work of family history. Using practice theory, and a disaggregated notion of 'identity', it explores how the storying of family histories relates to genealogy as a leisure hobby, a form of historical research, and an information-processing activity; and examines the social organization of that narrativity, where various practical engagements render certain kinds of genealogical information more, or less, 'storyable'. Key features of 'identity-work' in family history, such as the construction of genealogy as a personal journey of discovery and identification with particular ancestors, emerge as a consequence of the procedures of family history, organized as a set of practical tasks. The paper explores 'identity-work' as a consequence of people's engagement in specific social practices which provide an internal logic to their actions, with various components of 'identity' emerging as categories of practice shaped within, and for, use. Focusing on 'identity' as something produced when we are engaged in doing other things, the paper examines how the practical organization of 'doing other things' helps produce 'identity' in particular ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

This paper employs an Eliasian perspective to provide an historical overview to the contemporary crisis in British prisons. It argues that some of the roots of this crisis lie within the very attempts to bring prison development in line with the cultural values of modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an analysis of qualitative interview data from a study of formalized same‐sex relationships (civil partnerships) this paper examines the enduring significance of marriage and family as social institutions. In doing so, it intervenes in current debates in the sociology of family and personal life about how such institutions are undermined by reflexivity or bolstered by convention. Against the backdrop of dominating sociological frames for understanding the links between the changing nature of marriage and family and same‐sex relationship recognition, the paper analyses the diverse and overlapping ways (including the simple, relational, strategic, ambivalent and critical ways) in which same‐sex partners reflexively constructed and engaged with marriage and family conventions. My analysis suggests that instead of viewing reflexivity and convention as mutually undermining, as some sociologists of family and personal life do, it is insightful to explore how diverse forms of reflexivity and convention interact in everyday life to reconfigure the social institutions of marriage and family, but do not undermine them as such. I argue the case for recognizing the ways in which 'reflexive convention', or reflexive investment in convention, contributes to the continuing significance of marriage and family as social institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the position of the Chinese elite in both national and international contexts. I show that the Chinese elite has converged with the global elite in terms of their incomes, and that many senior Chinese executives are at least as well paid as their counterparts in rich countries. Their insertion into the global elite is further demonstrated by their increasing participation in the World Economic Forum. But this international convergence has been mirrored by national divergence: economic inequality has risen within China, extending the distance between elites and the rest of the population. I show that for top income groups, the relative cost of employing a median wage worker for their personal service has plummeted, increasing their entitlements over labor and thus their capacity to dominate their compatriots. This has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the reliance of the elite on domestic workers, a traditional symbol of social inequality. Thus the convergence of Chinese elites with their international counterparts has gone hand in hand with both rising economic inequality and rising social inequality within China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic and social transformation of China during the past 40 years is without precedent in human history. While the economic transformation was extensively studied, social transformation was not. In this paper, we use for the first time harmonized household surveys covering the period 1988–2013 to study the changes in the characteristics of the richest 5 percent of China's urban population. We find that it changed from being composed of high government officials, clerical staff, and workers in 1988 to professionals and small and large business owners in 2013. The educational level of the top group increased substantially. Membership in CCP has a positive (albeit small) effect on one's income but is particularly valuable to large business owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Monetary financing - the funding of state expenditure via the creation of new money rather than through taxation or borrowing - has become a taboo policy instrument in advanced economies. It is generally associated with dangerously high inflation and/or war. Relatedly, a key institutional feature of modern independent central banks is that they are not obligated to support government expenditure via money creation. Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, however, unorthodox monetary policies, in particular quantitative easing, coupled with stagnant growth and high levels of public and private debt have led to questions over the monetary financing taboo. Debates on the topic have so far been mainly theoretical with little attention to the social and political dynamics of historical instances of monetary financing. This paper analyses one of the most significant twentieth-century cases: Canada from the period after the Great Depression up until the monetarist revolution of the 1970s. The period was a successful one for the Canadian economy, with high growth and employment and manageable inflation. It offers some interesting insights into the relationship between states and central banks and present-day discussions around the governance of money creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the Brexit referendum, election of Donald Trump as president of the U.S., and importance of race in American society and politics.

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. : 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a list of books on Sociology received for the "British Journal of Sociology." Some of the books are: "Democracy and Social Ethics," by Jane Adams; "Psychology and Social Problems," by Michael Argyle; "The New Frontiersmen," by G.S. Aurora; "The Penal Press," by Russell N. Baird; "Race Relations," by Michael Banton; "The Impact of Television: Methods and Findings in Program Research," William A. Belson; "The Social Construction of Reality," by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger and "Culture and Society in India," by N.K. Bose.

This paper presents a report on the characteristics of persons planning a career in the legal profession in the U.S. In the sociology of occupations and professions the legal profession has certainly not suffered neglect. Yet, although there are reports of empirical research on career histories within the profession, characteristics and activities of lawyers in different specialities, political roles of lawyers, and other pertinent topics, little in the way of systematic empirical findings existed on the kinds of persons who are attracted to legal careers until the series of studies was undertaken from which the present report is derived. In the spring of 1961 the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) embarked on a study of the factors which enter into the educational and career plans of college students. As part of this study NORC collected pre-coded self-administered questionnaires from a national sample of college students who were due to receive the bachelors degree in June, 1961. The study involved a two-stage stratified sample of institutions and their senior classes, and resulted in a return of 33,982 questionnaires, or approximately 85 per cent of the sampled students. When weighted to be representative of the entire June, 1961 graduating class, this resulted in a total of 56,664 cases. The initial study reports contained data on the social origins of prospective lawyers. The present paper presents some of the results of a more extensive analysis of the role of background factors in the choice of a legal career and is drawn from a comprehensive analysis of the role of social origins, college experience and law school experiences in t

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

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]

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

A growing strand of the literature finds a causal negative impact of terrorism on undifferentiated discriminatory attitudes toward Muslims, migrants, and other minorities. In this paper, we argue that jihadist terrorism threatens first and foremost Muslims. To evaluate this claim, we estimate the causal effect of jihadist terrorism on the perceived discrimination among Muslims through a 2×2 quasi-experimental design. Exploiting "natural experiments" driven by exogenous variation in terror threat caused by jihadist attacks that unexpectedly occurred during the fieldwork of a large survey, we compare the perceived ethoracial discrimination of the relevant minority (Muslims) against other minorities (non-Muslims) before and after five different terror attacks in five different European countries. We find that jihadist attacks increase perceived ethnoracial discrimination among Muslims while reducing it among non-Muslims, and that individual-level factors including social status and economic insecurity mitigate public opinion responses to a greater extent than group-level factors do. Hence, while in-group attitudes toward out-groups tend to be undifferentiated, the experience of out-groups in the aftermath of jihadist attacks depends on the specific identity of the respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much recent discussion concerning the conceptual and empirical viability and value of the distinction between social class and social status, and in particular as implemented in the work of Chan and Goldthorpe. The present paper addresses certain of the issues that arise on the basis of a historical case, that of class and status in interwar England, with reference to housing, sports club membership, and dress. It seeks to show that, contrary to what has been claimed by various authors, the distinction can be effectively made and is indeed necessary to an understanding of these features of the social history of the period; that it is differential association that has to be seen as constitutive of status stratification, rather than differences in lifestyle; and that increased status striving, anxieties, and segregation, with adverse psychological consequences, can result from a narrowing as well as from a widening of class inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between parents' and children's language skills for a nationally representative birth cohort born in the United Kingdom--the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). We investigate both socioeconomic and ethnic differentials in children's vocabulary scores and the role of differences in parents' vocabulary scores in accounting for these. We find large vocabulary gaps between highly educated and less educated parents, and between ethnic groups. Nevertheless, socioeconomic and ethnic gaps in vocabulary scores are far wider among the parents than among their children. Parental vocabulary is a powerful mediator of inequalities in offspring's vocabulary scores at age 14, and also a powerful driver of change in language skills between the ages of five and 14. Once we account for parental vocabulary, no ethnic minority group of young people has a negative "vocabulary gap" compared to whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applauds the vision and originality of Piketty's Capital and Ideology. We draw attention to the distinctive methodological perspective which he adopts, which we liken to call "social science engineering." This allows a problem oriented perspective on long‐term global social change which sidesteps siloed disciplinary debates in social science and history about the meaning of modernity, the rise of capitalism, the formation of social groups, and the primacy of nations. We bring out how his theory of property permits him to take forward his overarching insight that economic growth leads to wealth accumulation. This, therefore, challenges long standing sociological perspectives by insisting that modernity is a conservative, rather than a revolutionary and transformative process. We build on this essential contribution by noting some areas where his work can push forward even further, notably that his focus on shifting relativities obscures qualitative historical changes, and more particularly means his analysis of the 20th century is not as provocative as that of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay evaluates Capital and Ideology in light of the Latin American experience. Given its history of exploitation and high levels of inequality, the region constitutes an essential case study. By considering the Latin America case, we can also benefit from the many insights coming from within the region and often overlooked by the Anglo‐Saxon (dominant) literature. The paper makes two different arguments. First, asymmetries in economic and political power are the main drivers of long‐term inequality. Following insights from structuralism, I show how the organization of the global economy has shaped domestic patterns of income distribution in many parts of the world. The dependent character of economic development together with the power of domestic elites explain Latin America's stubborn inequality; ideology has historically been more an instrument than an underlying driver. Second, we cannot understand the evolution of income distribution without considering the role of dictatorships. While Capital and Ideology explains convincingly why liberal democracies are not working, it never properly considers the risk and costs of (conservative) authoritarian regimes. In thinking about policy responses, the essay also highlights the importance of strengthening democracy, fighting dictatorships, and enhancing the influence of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper examines publics of young German Muslims. Case studies include the singer Huelya Kandemir, the theatre group Uma Lamo and the social network Zahnräder. By focusing on spiritual music publics, theatrical comedy publics and social publics, it tries a new approach to the way in which we understand minority public engagement. In addition to examining the concept of counterpublics, it utilizes the concept of participatory culture, which offers a relevant complement. The study argues that the publics of young German Muslims display multifaceted artistic and civic engagement, which can best be understood in terms of participation in cultural or civic productions and contribution to the wider German public. Features or effects of counterpublics, such as the countering of mainstream representations of minority identities and the offering of alternative discourses, are occasionally reflected in their activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrasting the classical explanation of military group cohesion as sustained by interpersonal bonds, recent scholars have highlighted the importance of ritualized communication, training and drills in explaining effective military performance in professional armies. While this has offered a welcome addition to the cohesion literature and a novel micro-sociological method of examining cohesion, its primary evidential base has been combat groups. Indeed, despite their prominent role in directing operations over the past decade, the British Army's officer corps has received relatively little attention from sociologists during this period. No attempt has been made to explain cohesion in the officer corps. Using a similar method to recent cohesion scholars, this paper seeks to address this imbalance by undertaking a micro-sociology of one ritual in particular: 'Barossa Night' in the Royal Irish Regiment. Firstly, it draws on the work of Durkheim to examine how cohesion amongst the officer corps is created and sustained through a dense array of practises during formal social rituals. It provides evidence that the use of rituals highlights that social solidarity is central to understanding officer cohesion. Secondly, following Hockey's work on how private soldiers negotiate order, the paper shows how this solidarity in the officer corps is based on a degree of negotiated order and the need to release organizational tensions inherent in a strictly hierarchical rank structure. It highlights how the awarding of gallantry medals can threaten this negotiated order and fuel deviancy. In examining this behaviour, the paper shows that even amongst an officer class traditionally viewed as the elite upholders of organizational discipline, the negotiation of rank and hierarchy can be fluid. How deviant behaviour is later accepted and normalized by senior officers indicates that negotiated order is as important to understanding cohesion in the British Army's officer corps as it is amongst private soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the value of a normative account of the relationship between agents and institutions for contemporary efforts to explain ever more complex and disorganized forms of social life. The character of social institutions, as they relate to practices, agents and norms, is explored through an engagement with the common claim that family life has been de-institutionalized. The paper argues that a normative rather than empirical definition of institutions avoids a false distinction between institutions and practices. Drawing on ideas of social freedom and creative action from critical theory, the changes in family life are explained not as an effect of de-institutionalization, but as a shift from an organized to a disorganized institutional type. This is understood as a response to changes in the wider normative structure, as a norm of individual freedom has undermined the legitimacy of the organized patriarchal nuclear family, with gender ascribed roles and associated duties. Contemporary motherhood is drawn on to illustrate the value of analysing the dynamic interactions between institutions, roles and practices for capturing both the complexity and the patterned quality of social experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse-historical approach ( Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities. UN commemorative discourse characteristically links memories of Holocaust and Rwandan trauma in a 'chain of communication' with those of other episodes of brutality (e.g., Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur) chiefly to convey the continuity of human barbarity across time and endorse certain presuppositions regarding the fate of a fallen humanity in this more 'post-secular' age. As scenes of mourning, UN commemorations unite participating international delegations in their expressions of grief for the victims of 'preventable tragedies' in the past but also, it must be said, their uncertainty regarding new horrors likely to occur in the future. The duty to remember is reiterated continuously as both a mark of respect to those who have already perished and as a warning of atrocities yet to unfold. This paper explores how the historical constancy of violence is interpreted by the UN through a detailed critical analysis of its recently inaugurated 'remembrance through education' programme aimed at a transnational collective learning from atrocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Ulrich Beck states in the Risk Society (1992) that the rise of the social production of risks in the risk society signals that class ceases to be of relevance; instead the hierarchical logic of class will be supplanted by the egalitarian logic of the distribution of risks. Several trenchant critiques of Beck's claim have justified the continued relevance of class to contemporary society. While these accounts have emphasized continuity, they have not attempted to chart, as this paper will, how the growing social production of risk increases the importance of class. This paper argues that it is Beck's undifferentiated, catastrophic account of risk that undergirds his rejection of class, and that by inserting an account of risk involving gradations in both damages and calculability into Beck's framework, his theory of risk society may be used to develop a critical theory of class. Such a theory can be used to reveal how wealth differentials associated with class relations actually increase in importance to individuals' life-chances in the risk society. With the growing production and distribution of bads, class inequalities gain added significance, since it will be relative wealth differentials that both enables the advantaged to minimize their risk exposure and imposes on others the necessity of facing the intensified risks of the risk society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the reasons why national forms of identification and organization (might) matter in the contemporary era. In contrast to the majority of macro-sociological work dealing with this topic, I develop an analytical framework that draws together recent research on everyday nationalism with micro-sociological and psychological studies pointing to the importance of routine practices, institutional arrangements and symbolic systems in contributing to a relatively settled sense of identity, place and community. The second part of the paper focuses on the hierarchies of belonging that operate within a given national setting. Of particular interest is the largely taken-for-granted status of the ethnic majority and the degree to which it underpins claims to belonging and entitlement that are used to secure key allocative and authoritative resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recognized young people's educational expectations as a key factor in predicting educational outcomes, but few studies have attempted a comprehensive classification of how young people's educational expectations are shaped. In this article, I outline a typology of how young people from different social class origins shape their educational expectations. Drawing on 100 interviews with 15‐year‐olds, I find two underlying dimensions in young people's accounts of their educational expectations: how risk aware they are and how goal oriented they are. These dimensions translate into a heuristic model for understanding the structure of young people's educational expectations. I identify four major approaches to shaping educational expectations ‐ the confident, the determined, the explorative, and the anxious ‐ and show how these approaches connect to the young people's class origin. The typology of approaches offers a conceptual framework for understanding the mechanisms that lead young people to shape their expectations in qualitatively different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an essential but neglected aspect of recent discussions of the banking and financial system, namely money itself. Specifically, I take up a distinction drawn by Susan Strange which has never been fully elaborated: between a financial system that is global, and an international monetary system that remains largely territorial. I propose a sociological elaboration of this distinction by examining each category, 'finance' and 'money', in terms of its distinctive orientation to risk and debt. Money is distinguished by its high degree of liquidity and low degree of risk, corresponding to expectations that derive from its status as a 'claim upon society'- a form of socialized debt. But as Strange argued, these features of money are being undermined by the proliferation of sophisticated instruments of financial risk management -'strange money'- that, as monetary substitutes, both weaken states' capacity to manage money, and more broadly, contribute to 'overbanking'. The ultimate danger, according to Strange, is the 'death of money'. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the distinction for sociological arguments about the changing nature of money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, trust has been conceptualized as an important source of social capital, setting off cross‐disciplinary research on both the benefits and predictors of trust at the individual and contextual level. In this paper, we turn to the individual outcomes of living in a trustful context, and explore the relationship between trust, itself one of the main components of social capital, and social support, seen as one of the most important effects of social capital. In particular, we ask how social capital—and the relationship between trust and social support—functions in the context of unequal societies. We model perceived support as an outcome across three levels, from no support to proximate to distal support, and using a cross‐national study of Roma and non‐Roma across 12 European countries, we track the relationship between trust and support across both mainstream and marginalized populations. Our findings suggest that living in contexts with more trust has protective effects particularly for members of marginalized groups: the Roma are more likely to have distal support in contexts with higher trust. We conclude that contextual trust helps to broaden the circle of support beyond family and friends; thus, trust can indeed be a synthetic force that binds individuals together in broadened structures of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time use is both a cause of social inequality and a consequence of social inequality. However, how social class stratifies time use patterns is seldom studied. In this paper, I describe the time use patterns in the years 1983 and 2015 by social class, and gender in the British context. Using sequence analysis methods, I show how the diversity of time use patterns in British society is socially stratified. I find that 13 clusters capture the heterogeneity of time use patterns and that these clusters are associated with social class, gender, and day of the week. These clusters capture patterns of paid and unpaid work schedules, as well as leisure patterns. The results show that men have experienced a reduction of the standard Monday to Friday 8‐hr working day, while women have experienced a general increase in this type of schedule. On the other hand, patterns of domestic working days have reduced for women and increased for men. Important differences exist in paid and unpaid work patterns between social classes. Working‐class women have experienced an important increase in shift work on weekends. They are also much more likely to be doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to upper‐class and middle‐class women. Working‐class men are more likely to experience non‐working days and leisure days on both weekdays and weekends and are more likely to be doing shift work. They are also more often doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to men in upper‐class households. Patterns of childcare indicate that all families have increased their childcare time. Men in upper‐class households in particular have experienced an important growth in childcare time between 1983 and 2015. I conclude by discussing how time use can further our understanding of social stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present empirical results that show that detailed occupations have distinctive patterns of association with voluntary participation. We draw upon data from four secondary survey datasets from the UK (coverage 1972–2012). Occupations are shown to link to volunteering in a wide range of scenarios and in individual, household, and longitudinal contexts. We argue that these linkages provide insight into social inequalities in volunteering, and that they can help us to understand the relative influence of "circumstance" and "habits" in enabling or inhibiting voluntary participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of bilateral foreign aid in supporting the diffusion and enactment of common models and institutions of the rule of law among aid‐recipient low‐ and middle‐income countries. We ask whether aid targeted at security‐sector reform and the rule of law influences the adoption of constitutional and legal reforms over time (institutional diffusion), and whether aid also supports more effective implementation of the rule of law, writ large (legal reach). We use event history and fixed‐effects panel regression models to examine a sample of 154 countries between 1995 and 2013 to answer these questions. Our findings suggest that aid does increase the likelihood of adopting several rule of law reforms, but its effect on increasing the depth or quality of rule of law over time within countries is much less substantial. These findings suggest that though aid may play a role in supporting the diffusion of models contributing to state isomorphism among countries, it is less effective at increasing the pervasiveness and quality of such model's implementation. This discrepancy between the effectiveness of bilateral aid in promoting law on the books versus law in action in aid recipient countries calls into question the current approach to rule of law reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent street tests of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the UK and makes the case for an experimental approach in the sociology of intelligent technology. In recent years intelligent vehicle testing has moved from the laboratory to the street, raising the question of whether technology trials equally constitute tests of society. To adequately address this question, I argue, we need to move beyond analytic frameworks developed in 1990s Science and Technology Studies, which stipulated "a social deficit" of both intelligent technology and technology testing. This diagnosis no longer provides an effective starting point for sociological analysis, as real‐world tests of intelligent technology explicitly seek to bring social phenomena within the remit of technology testing. I propose that we examine instead whether and how the introduction of intelligent vehicles into the street involves the qualification and re‐qualification of relations and dynamics between social actors. I develop this proposal through a discussion of a field study of AV street trials in three cities in the UK—London, Milton Keynes, and Coventry. These urban trials were accompanied by the claim that automotive testing on the open road will enable cars to operate in tune with the social environment, and I show how iterations of street testing undo this proposition and compel its reformulation. Current test designs are limited by their narrow conception of sociality in terms of interaction between cars and other road users. They exclude from consideration the relational capacities of vehicles and human road users alike—their ability to co‐exist on the open road. I conclude by making the case for methodological innovation in social studies of intelligent technology: by combining social research and design methods, we can re‐purpose real‐world test environments in order to elucidate social issues and dynamics raised by intelligent vehicles in society by experimental means, and, possibly, test society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National and international policy‐makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically, and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorize and develop the concept of a "policy assemblage" from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: "liberal environmentalism"; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; "green capitalism" (also known as "climate capitalism") and finally "no‐growth economics." A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a "posthuman" policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governmentality studies and social theories agree that in contemporary societies the idea of autonomy is no longer simply an ideal or an individual aspiration but a social obligation. In an attempt to clarify the meaning of autonomy in this day and age, this paper asks how individuals perceive and negotiate the various dimensions of autonomy and how this affects the functioning of late‐modern institutions. The empirical insights derived from a qualitative study provide a differentiated picture of how individuals pursue their claims to autonomy and comply with institutional demands for autonomy in everyday practice. By presenting seven types of late‐modern "autonomy managers," the analysis evinces a usurpation of autonomous agency that renders individuals the institutional editors of the contemporary contradictions, deficits, and tensions that occur in their everyday interactions. This comes at the price of notionally free but exhausted actors running short of all kinds of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that encounters between welfare bureaucracies and their clients have been reconfigured under neoliberalism to address the problem of "welfare dependency." Contemporary bureaucratic encounters therefore entail measures to activate clients' entrepreneurial/self‐governing capacities, and conditionality/sanctioning practices to deal with clients who behave "irresponsibly." Despite the dominance of the neoliberal model, recent research has identified a counter‐trend in the practices of housing services away from entrepreneurializing and punitive strategies and towards a more supportive approach. This paper examines this counter‐trend and its implications for neoliberal welfare governance. To do this, it presents findings from research into social housing governance in Queensland, Australia, where the neoliberal focus on welfare independence, conditionality and sanctioning has been tempered by a new supportive approach focused on assisting vulnerable clients to maintain and benefit from access to welfare/housing support. Following Larner, we argue that this shift signals the emergence of an "after neoliberal" governmental formation, wherein key features of neoliberal governmentality are replaced by, or redeployed in the service of, progressive initiatives that address neoliberalism's failings at the street level, but leave broader neoliberal policy settings undisturbed. We also challenge recent sociological accounts that construe supportive welfare practices as a function of an all‐encompassing neoliberal project, arguing instead for appreciation of the contingency of these developments and the progressive political affordances that they entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative data of an upper‐secondary school in Sweden's primary elite community, Djursholm, I propose how medical diagnosis of students as dyslexics contributes to consecrating them by offering a short cut to successful performance, while at the same time reproducing differences between social classes. The study suggests how students that do not score top can be labeled dyslexic and the social and moral consequences of that. I introduce the concept of "consecrating medicalization" in order to discriminate between the effects of medical diagnosis of members of different social classes. In this way, this paper contributes to further examining some key problems in medical sociology and the sociology of elites, by offering a framework of synthesis and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]