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A great amount of effort has gone into studying correspondences between contemporary class structures and the distribution of lifestyles and media practices therein. Structural overlaps between these spaces imply the existence of a symbolic order, where dominant factions of society constitute taste keepers endowed with the power to stigmatize those below them in the social hierarchy. Yet, research has not come to terms with the reach and depth of this symbolic order. This study combines the Bourdieusian approach with recent developments in stigma research and the notion of felt stigma. Using multiple correspondence analysis on a survey with the adult Swedish population (n = 2003) findings align with previous research in that the social space is built around capital volume and capital composition, and that media practices connect to that structure. This symbolic order is not, however, internalized by people at lower social positions. Instead, it is people invested in culture and arts – a cultural middle-class – who are most likely to anticipate that others would look down on their practices and preferences.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused countries around the world to initiate societal lockdowns, especially during the spring of 2020. This article focuses on online gaming’s role in young people’s lives during the lockdown in Denmark. Informed by a practice theoretical framework, the analyses of 35 interviews with young people (16–19 years) examine how gaming proved to be something to do in a situation of nothing to do. The analyses find that the young people’s gaming practices were beneficial (a) in allowing the young people to maintain a social life and (b) in providing a legitimate social space for maintaining friendships and/or coping with boredom. The findings demonstrate that young people who engage with online gaming are capable of adapting to fundamental changes to society to fulfil their social needs and aspirations, including during a pandemic.

Background: Despite the notion of stigma as a socio-cultural process with the concept rooted in social space rather than in individual space, global studies examining impact of cultural differences on stigma toward substance use disorders are lacking. Aim: In this study, we aim to study the influence of national culture differences on stigma toward alcohol and substance use disorders. Methods: We analyzed individual-level data from 68,041 respondents from 49 countries on stigma toward alcohol and substance use disorders. We examined the effect of the national culture dimensions and national alcohol and substance consumption rates on stigma toward alcohol and substance use disorders using hierarchical linear modeling. Results: Our hierarchical linear modeling results indicate that cultural dimensions and consumption rates significantly influence stigma. We found significant positive associations between stigma toward AUD and institutional collectivism and assertiveness, but a negative association with future orientation dimension. Like AUD, stigma toward SUD was also positively associated with institutional collectivism and assertiveness, but negatively associated with power distance. Conclusions: The study findings have immense implications for national interventions to decrease stigma and influence policy making.

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out. publishedVersion

Research within literatures on multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has moved beyond studying the institutional basis and discursive negotiations of differences towards an understanding of the embodied and practical dimensions of everyday social interactions. An emergent literature has also started to consider the role of vibrant material agents, atmosphere, and their environmental contexts in understanding diversity spaces. We wish to contribute to this literature through a visual and material ethnographic approach, taking two cafes in Copenhagen, Denmark as emblematic cases. We locate these sites in the particular socio-cultural space of Nørrebro – a neighbourhood characterised by the ethnic diversity of its inhabitants, but also by political tensions, government-supported gentrification, and community-driven restructuring and rebuilding. Taking an ecological approach to these spaces, we argue that socio-material arrangements may serve to solve or express diversity through the aesthetic organisation of human and non-human actors. We interpret such material forms as co-constitutive agents of diversity politics.

In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to explicitly interrogate the racialized economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms of social space. This work interrogates the overt and covert racial organization of social spaces and the ways in which systemic White supremacy is facilitated by racialized space. Drawing on and synthesizing that work we explicate a critical theory of White space, explicating how geographical, physical, cultural, and ideological social spaces reproduce a racialized social structure organized by White supremacy. We argue that White spaces are integral to racialized social systems and global anti-Black racism in ways that not only normalize the existing racial and social order but ensures Whites’ fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, as well as control over brown and Black bodies.

Under the Trump administration and its “zero-tolerance” policy, the number of detained asylum seekers in the United States has been growing significantly. Yet we know little about their mobility, agency, and social relations at the micro level during the time they are subject to a detention regime. This is because research about detention has frequently developed independently of sustained engagement with the lived experience of those detained within the relevant institutions. Building on literature about the spatiality of social relations and studies that analyze detention “from below,” the current article conceptualizes detention as a social space in which social relations between detained asylum seekers are formed and negotiated. It draws on ethnographic material collected in detention prisons in the greater New York City area and pays particular attention to the seemingly mundane social facets of everyday life in detention. The article reveals the complexity, ambivalences, and forms of social relations that range from shared and unifying feelings of injustice, to the development of friendships and shared practices of resistance and disobedience that sometimes even go beyond the confines of detention. This perspective allows us to see detained people as agents in the exercise of power and in negotiation with structures of control, waiting, punishment, and exploitation that organize but do not complete their everyday lives in detention.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Think Tanks in Central and Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Katarzyna Jezierska and Serena Giusti. The article looks at think tanks through the prism of a specific social space whose emergence is ascribable to both transnational processes and local social structures. Four processes are identified as shaping the institutionalization of the first think tanks in Belarus, founded as a tool for the “desovietization” of science and “democratization” of politics in the early 1990s: (1) the destabilization of relations between science and politics spurred by the Soviet perestroika beginning in 1986; (2) the autonomization of national elites and a political field in Belarus following the collapse of the Soviet Union; (3) the transformation of the labor market, including the crisis of state-supported research and academia, which ejected a large number of well-educated professionals; and (4) the intensification of transnational exchanges and the legitimization of references to Western practices. To systematically analyze these processes, a model consisting of the following four dimensions is proposed: configuration of relations between science and politics, position of the think tank space in the field of power, professional logics of career or competition, and transnational diffusion of resources and their local appropriation.

This article argues that the pattern of urbanization in India has kept pace with the growth of railways during the British period. The colonial railways transformed India’s circulatory regime, which resulted in the emergence of social space. Towns and cities in the hinterlands of the port cities under the railways network became more urbanised. Railways, as a biggest British capitalist manoeuvre, helped in the process of industrialization and growth of trade and commerce. Some towns and cities grew up as major railway stations, terminals or junctions, divisional and zonal headquarters during the British period. The growth of railways is demonstrated in relation to the expansion in transportation of goods, passengers and employment opportunities generated. The article discerns the pattern of railway transportation and infrastructural development, which will help us to comprehend as one of the forces underlying the pattern of urbanisation in India during the British rule.

Urban vitality, as a metric, measures the attractiveness and competitiveness of a city and is a driver of development. As the physical and social space of human activities, the urban landscape has close connections with urban vitality according to classical theories. However, limited quantitative criteria for the urban landscape and gaps between macro urban planning and micro design create difficulties when constructing a vibrant city. In this study, we quantitatively examined the relationship between the urban landscape and urban vitality at the street block level using geospatial open data to discover where, how, and to what extent we could improve urban vitality, taking 15 Chinese metropolises as a case study. Results indicate that, among the three aspects of the urban landscape considered, the city plan pattern has the highest effect on stimulating vitality, followed by the land use and the patterns of building form. Specifically, the three-dimensional form of buildings has a greater effect than a two-dimensional form. In addition, convenient transportation, a compact block form, diverse buildings, mixed land use, and high buildings are the main characteristics of vibrant blocks. The results also show that the effects of the urban landscape have spatial variations and obvious diurnal discrepancies. Furthermore, over 20 and 33% of the blocks in these cities are identified as low-vitality blocks during the day and night, respectively, and are then categorized into six different types. The identification of the common characteristics of these low-vitality blocks can be taken as references for designing a vibrant urbanity.

Sociologists often imagine society as spaces, yet how social spaces are related remains ambiguous in most theories. In developing his field theory, Bourdieu used extensively the concept of homology to describe the structural similarities across fields, but he had not taken seriously the spaces between fields or how fields are related to each other. Adopting the Simmelian approach of formal sociology, this article outlines six basic social forms by which social spaces are related. It argues that relations between social spaces can be understood along two dimensions: heterogeneity and social distance. In terms of heterogeneity, social spaces can be kindred, symbiotic or oppositional. In terms of social distance, they can be linked, nested or overlapping. These social forms of interspatial relations are constituted by the boundary work of a variety of actors, including guardians, brokers and space travellers. The article provides a general vocabulary for thinking about how social spaces are related and how they interact across boundaries.

The study of sexual exploitation of trafficked victims cannot be done without understanding their enforced isolation. To better understand the dynamics of isolation, this study examined how traffickers used different elements of isolation and how such tactics may have contributed to the traffickers’ success in maintaining control over the victim(s). We examined in-depth narratives from 14 women between the ages of 20 to 53, primarily immigrants, who were recruited from an agency serving victims of sex trafficking in a large metropolitan city. The tactics used by traffickers varied and included not only the commonly defined structural isolation in which victims are restricted physically and socially, but also included a shrinking of safe social space and an elimination of privacy and social support. The latter, which we label as functional isolation, refers to instances when survivors are surrounded by peers who are either unreliable or aligned with the trafficker and thus are unable to give true social support. Survivors reported a combination of isolation tactics (i.e., both structural isolation and functional isolation). The different interwoven types and patterns of isolation reported by former victims of trafficking help address a dearth in the coercive control and abuse literature, providing a richer understanding of isolation in trafficking survivors.

This article studies the preferences of middle-class residents for old or new neighborhoods in two Israeli cities, and describes the ways local social space mediates the translation of the habitus into generative preferences. Most sociological studies either ignore questions of place or explicitly reject the role of place in shaping class tastes. While a number of recent studies have demonstrated the role of place in shaping class tastes, the mechanisms underlying the role of place have yet to be investigated and conceptualized. This study addresses this lacuna. Based on a mixed-methods comparative design, the article first presents the relationship between spatial and class processes underlying the particular social space of each of the two cities – that is, the local association between old/new neighborhoods and different populations, symbolic boundaries, and expectations regarding the future of different neighborhoods. It then shows how local social space is reflected in local narratives and patterns of distinction, which are interwoven with residents' accounts of their choices and preferences. The study argues that middle-class tastes are formed locally by a process of “emplacement,” in which social actors find their socially designated place in specific urban settings and develop the tastes and dispositions associated with these areas.

In this article, I present a critical phenomenological reworking of Lefebvre’s theory of social space from the perspective of minority subjects. To do so, I identify phenomenological themes present in The Production of Space, reading it alongside Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. This reading emphasizes Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty’s shared critiques of space, their relational ontologies, and their emphasis on bodily practice. With these shared concerns in view, I then extend this phenomenological reading of Production by bringing it into conversation with scholarship in critical phenomenology. Critical phenomenology has developed largely out of the work of Merleau-Ponty and seeks to revise classical phenomenological accounts to attend to issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other categories of social difference. I demonstrate how critical phenomenology can be brought to bear on Lefebvre’s account of social space and the subject, considering how it can concretize and actualize the political potential Lefebvre attaches to differential embodiment in Production. Bringing these perspectives to bear on Lefebvre’s conception, I argue, does important work to actualize his vision of differential embodiment as a political and spatial practice.

Social networks represent two different facets of social life: (1) stable paths for diffusion, or the spread of something through a connected population, and (2) random draws from an underlying social space, which indicate the relative positions of the people in the network to one another. The dual nature of networks creates a challenge: if the observed network ties are a single random draw, is it realistic to expect that diffusion only follows the observed network ties? This study takes a first step toward integrating these two perspectives by introducing a social space diffusion model. In the model, network ties indicate positions in social space, and diffusion occurs proportionally to distance in social space. Practically, the simulation occurs in two parts. First, positions are estimated using a statistical model (in this example, a latent space model). Then, second, the predicted probabilities of a tie from that model—representing the distances in social space—or a series of networks drawn from those probabilities—representing routine churn in the network—are used as weights in a weighted averaging framework. Using longitudinal data from high school friendship networks, the author explores the properties of the model. The author shows that the model produces smoothed diffusion results, which predict attitudes in future waves 10 percent better than a diffusion model using the observed network and up to 5 percent better than diffusion models using alternative, non-model-based smoothing approaches.

Background/Context Research has documented the benefits of family and parental involvement in children's schooling, both developmentally and across domains. Classroom teachers play pivotal roles in establishing and maintaining home–school partnerships because of their sustained contact with children. Despite this, few studies have examined empirically how urban teachers actually define their own roles in helping schools to connect with diverse families and, especially, the power asymmetries that exist between families, teachers, and schools themselves in a climate of increased accountability and scrutiny of urban public schools. Purpose/Objectives Using Bourdieu's concepts of social space and symbolic capital, this qualitative study examined urban teachers’ perspectives on their roles in facilitating effective partnerships with diverse families and the ways that issues of power, authority, and the need for boundaries in home–school relationships were expressed in their discourse. Setting Data were gathered at four public schools in a major metropolitan city in the Northeast. All were racially/ethnically diverse (more than 50% non-White in all schools) and served high percentages of low-socioeconomic-status families. Participants Participants were 44 classroom teachers. All but two teachers were female; participants were racially diverse (42% White, 42% Black, 16% Latino/a) and had been teaching for an average of 17.25 years. Research Design Qualitative focus group interviews were conducted with teachers at each participating school site over the course of six months. Data Collection/Analysis Focus group data were analyzed using qualitative content analytic techniques. Findings/Results Analyses generated three themes that illustrated the powerful but contradictory positioning of teachers in facilitating authentic partnerships with families—(a) creating responsive relationships, (b) casting engagement as education, and (c) creating varied and tailored opportunities—yet also revealed teachers’ assertions of power and authority, most often expressed as a need for boundaries between home and school. Conclusions/Recommendations Findings support a progressive approach to family engagement and educator resistance whereby teachers engage in collaborative advocacy with urban families to reclaim the notion of teaching as a public service aimed at the promotion of equitable, accessible, and culturally responsive schools.

The Weibo platform is a social space for interaction and expression. This requires scholars to examine, in a simultaneous fashion, communication patterns and the communicated content among Weibo users. Based on theories of ‘network and culture’ and relational sociology, this article contends that network fields and the communicated cultural meanings are mutually constituted. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model and social network analysis techniques were used to examine 51,288 Weibo posts published by users concerned for workers revealing the relationship between community structures and communities’ focal topics. Specifically, the result of LDA topic modeling shows that the focal topics regarding labor issues could be categorized into four groups: workers’ culture (art and entertainment) and welfare; predicaments and problems; strikes (rights defending actions) and labor organizations; and institutions and labor rights. Analysis of interaction patterns among users resulted in the identification of five major online communities which, based on the primary communicated topics within communities, were labeled as the Labor Homeland Community; Labor Culture Community; Labor Rights Protection Community; Labor Interest Concerned Community; and Labor Institution Concerned Community. The results also showed two new trends in relation to labor issues: first, workers’ culture and their integration into urban life have garnered increasing online attention with the growth of new generation workers; and second, the Weibo platform provides an interaction channel for labor researchers and labor non-governmental organizations, and such interaction facilitates the latter to critically reflect the current conditions or plights of workers from an institutional/structural perspective. This article concludes with a discussion about the significance of utilizing big data analytics to study online culture and social mentality.

Purpose: The social aspect of leadership is often overlooked in the educational reform. This study aims to address the dearth of work in the social space around leadership and examines two different types of relational ties between leaders that capture the affective and work-related aspects of interpersonal relationships. Research Method: This study takes place in one large urban school district serving a highly diverse student population and investigates a multiplex relation—energy and work-related influence—from a longitudinal dataset to better understand the complex nature of social ties. Descriptive statistics, multilevel social network modeling, and network sociograms are used to understand the characteristics of this over-time multiplex relationship among central office and site leaders. Findings: Drawing on social network theory, efficacy, and climate, findings suggest that gender, work level, experience, efficacy, and climate are associated with leaders engaging in this multiplex relationship over time. Conclusion and Implications: Investigating the intersection of both affective and instrumental relationships provides a nuanced and more reality-based picture about a complex set of leadership ties and perceptions as they go about improving educational systems.

This article focuses on the meaning of sport activities for refugees living in a reception centre. We conceptualise the reception centre as a liminal space and analyse how this liminal space affects the meanings of sport activities for refugees. Based on interviews with refugees living in a reception centre we show how sport in this liminal space is to a large extent experienced as a way to overcome the boredom experienced at the centre, to forget about their daily struggles, but also has a large social function as it is an easy opportunity to meet with others. We argue that liminal spaces constrain the organisation of sport activities and its possibilities for realising sport’s ascribed positive spill-overs, such as increasing feelings of belonging. We call for future research, including creative social research approaches, that focus on refugees’ own narratives in order to better understand the role social space plays for the meaning of sport activities for this particular vulnerable group.

Based on an ethnographic and mixed-methods research design, the article explores the social and interactive processes of disenfranchisement of perinatal grief through the mechanisms of silence, silencing and self-censorship in encounters between bereaved women and the social milieu. The analysis finds that disenfranchisement results from the constriction of the social space of bereavement along various lines of discourse, cultural values, practice and materiality, that include: the passing of time (expectations of a quick ‘recovery’); competing discourses of loss (simplistic-dominant vs. complex-subordinate meaning-making); the biometrics of pregnancy (lower gestational age being equated with less intense grief); gendered ideas of reproduction and feeling rules; asymmetries in social power; social spheres (hospital, home, community, support groups); socio-materialities and performance/ritual; and structural aspects of social and familial organization (gender, age, intergenerational and kin v. non-kin relations). These processes are intimately linked to the complication of grief by undermining support, meaning-making and continuing bonds.

Drawing upon a broad concept of inclusion, the first section of this article is dedicated to a critical discussion of the principle of ‘equal opportunities’, which currently dominates the social justice discourse in Germany. Specifically, this section examines how far this principle, which focuses on the role of the individual in socially unequal educational outcomes, could itself contain elements which reinforce inequality. It examines two versions, ‘talent-based’ and ‘attainment-based’. In the second section, this article discusses, from an intersectional perspective, how cumulative disadvantages in segregated social environments can increase inequalities in the educational participation and attainment of school pupils. The third section points to areas for action that have a real potential to address inequalities in the German school system. It draws on observations and findings which are grounded in the theory of justice and that emerge from cases of ‘overperforming schools in segregated environments’.

Theoretical approaches to public opinion are hard to find in the sociological literature, with the exception of the seminal work of Jürgen Habermas. One important alternative, although almost unknown in the English-speaking world, is offered in a few contributions by the systems theoretician Niklas Luhmann. Both critical theory and systems theory start from a historical analysis of the conditions that led to the rise of a public sphere and understand its function as the limitation and control of the arbitrariness of power. Critical theory considers the public sphere as a social space where citizens can (or should) participate and discuss freely and without constraints. Thus, it legitimizes political power. Systems theory presents a completely different concept of the public sphere and conceives of it in terms of second-order observation. Through public opinion the modern political system observes itself and stimulates as well as limits its decision-making processes. This paper argues that both approaches share the idea that the political system, like every other social subsystem, must generate a system-specific uncertainty (i.e. specific conditions that it cannot control) in order to limit its own arbitrariness and to be able to develop its decision-making potential. Both approaches locate this uncertainty in the sphere of public opinion. But they radically differ in the way they conceptualize public opinion’s effects on modern politics. Such differences between critical theory and systems theory are illustrated by an analysis of recent political events.

This article mobilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s full theory-method to study how class shapes our news orientations in a digital, high-choice media environment. An online survey ( N = 3850) was used to create a statistical representation of the contemporary Swedish social space with variables measuring access to economic, cultural, social, and cosmopolitan capital. A range of digital news preferences and practices were then given co-ordinates in that space. Results highlight the importance of class habitus for the formation of digital news repertoires. Since different groups form altogether different news repertoires—and distaste the preferences of the groups most different to themselves (in terms of access to capitals)—news practices and preferences solidify the positions of groups in the social structure. The study sheds light on the relationship between social and digital inequality and challenges the psychological and individualistic bias in contemporary research on news media use.

Today, ‘fear’ in its diverse facets is a topic growing in relevance in the media discourse. However, apart from analyses of individual psychic pathologies or general macro-sociological diagnoses, it has been largely neglected in (empirical) social sciences. The increasingly influential works of Bourdieu are no exception here, even though the concept of habitus inherently transcends positive interests such as lifestyle preferences, as analyzed in La Distinction. This becomes explicitly clear in his late works, above all in La Misère du monde, where the dispositions of agents are described in terms of the fears and worries associated with their positions in the social space and societal transformation processes. In this article the authors show that concerns, fear, and worries are constitutive characteristics of the habitus by investigating the structure of ‘fear manifestations’ in relation to the social space. Following Bourdieu’s conception, they construct a model of the Norwegian social space by applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to survey data. They then investigate how questions on fears and concerns are related to the capital structure of the space. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and a reflection of their implications for a sociology of symbolic domination.

Objective: Models of patient and family-centered care advocate catering to psychosocial needs when designing healthcare facilities yet there is little evidence available to determine how the built environment can cater to psychosocial needs. This article highlights the obstacles to overcoming this knowledge deficit in the pursuit of evidence-based guidelines to inform social provisions within the pediatric hospital setting. It will propose a working definition for psychosocial space and identify new research directions to enhance understandings of the relationship between social space and well-being. Background: While traditional multibed ward configurations afforded opportunities for peer support relationships to develop, both for patients and caregivers, the contemporary preference for single-occupancy rooms intensifies the need to critically examine social spaces within the pediatric hospital. Methods: Research suggests a correlation between social support and well-being. This article reviews the research underpinning contemporary understandings of this relationship; it positions literature from sociology, environmental psychology, and evidence-based design to highlight the limitations of this knowledge and identify where additional research is required to inform evidence-based design guidelines for psychosocially supportive spaces within pediatric healthcare settings. Conclusions: Evidence regarding the therapeutic value of social support within the pediatric hospital is not sufficiently sophisticated or conclusive to inform guidelines for the provision of social space with pediatric hospitals. There is an urgent need for targeted research to inform evidence-based design guidelines; this will demand a broad disciplinary approach.

This article considers the challenges encountered by a recently appointed assistant programme leader in establishing an identity as a leader of an EdD programme. In discussing literature on the development of the EdD, the article recognizes an existing concern with student identity but highlights a need to consider the development of the EdD leader’s identity as a leader. Employing a reflexive narrative, the article emphasizes the centrality of the leader’s disabled identity in considering the role of assistant programme leader and thus becoming a leader. The EdD is identified as a social space where colleagues are often engaged in their professional learning with the EdD leadership team providing support. This article tracks some of the commonplace behaviours around such learning in a post-1992 institution, and discusses the implications for EdD leadership and management teams when trying to consider and implement changes to established organizational cultures.

Margaret Archer’s work suggests that reflexivity is exercised through internal dialogues, in which subjects talk to themselves in order to clarify ideas, mull over problems, make plans, and take decisions. The present article argues that the exercise of reflexive competences is not limited to the privacy of individual minds, but that there is also an external component, which can lend the concept a broader analytical scope. Using the results of qualitative research focused on the social mechanisms of personal reflexivity, including biographical interviews, the article examines two other modalities of exercising reflexivity: external conversations in interaction contexts and writing practices (autobiographical, creative, communicational, and organisational). It also looks at the differential activation of reflexivity according to both the subjects’ different positions in social space and inter- and intra-contextual variations.

This study examines the consistency of Pierre Bourdieu’s homology thesis by assessing, at a class-fraction level, the statistical significance of the differences in taste and lifestyle reported in Distinction. According to Bourdieu, taste and lifestyle vary not only from one social class to another, but also within social classes themselves, depending on the type of capital (notably, cultural or economic) that prevails among class fractions. In this article, we estimate the cultural distance separating eight fractions of the middle and upper classes by performing bilateral between-proportion comparison tests. Two levels of analysis are considered: the intra-class and the inter-class fraction levels. The first level only involves within-class comparisons. It aims to test the empirical basis of the concept of capital composition. The second level only involves comparisons between middle-class and upper-class fractions. It aims to test Bourdieu’s representation of social space. Results indicate that 1) the composition of capital is associated with taste variability in both the middle and upper classes, and 2) taste similarities and dissimilarities between fractions belonging to different classes are linked to cultural capital. In sum, this study provides additional evidence for the consistency of Bourdieu’s homology thesis.

China’s wall is part of Chinese history—both as habitation (walled settlements) and as an icon of Chinese civilization. More significantly, China’s wall, as a configured part of social space is a spatial metaphor of division and differentiation. According to Bourdieu, space is about social organization and power. This article is a sociohistorical discourse on China’s wall, specifically on social space as conceptualized and perceived in imperial China, during the Mao era and in China today. Bourdieu’s concept of space as social and relational lends itself to the deconstruction of the metaphorical wall. It is contended that the age-old hukou/household registration, reestablished by Mao in conjunction with the danwei/work/administrative system, constitutes a part of this wall. The intent behind this discourse is to gain insight into Chinese conceptualization and perceptions of space within a sociohistorical framework.

Although in several forms and in different terms, the notion of generosity in architecture has recently received increased attention in contemporary debates, definitions of generosity and its cognates remain sparse and perfunctory, and their connotations generally unclear and in most cases subjective, hinged in the emotional sphere and thus resistant to being measurably related to projects. Moreover, no theoretical framework of architectural generosity has to date been articulated. This article collects the various definitions of generosity, including such cognate terms as abundance, surplus, or superfluity, and deduces the patterns therein to produce a schema of the qualitative characteristics of architectural generosity. By qualitatively describing how scholars apply the notion of architectural generosity, this article provides a theoretical framework for further studies of the phenomenon.

Recent literature on citizenship practices and discourses highlights processes of ‘subjectification’ or ‘self-making’ in relation to a local community rather than the rights and responsibilities associated with the legal status bestowed on full members of a national community. In this paper, set in the town of Chicaloma in the Yungas region of Bolivia, I argue that this self-making is not simply a response to hegemonic national norms, nor to a communally defined image of its ideal member, but rather is bound up in simultaneous processes of ‘community-making’. Further, I argue that community-making is itself a hotly contested process. Access to specific social and economic resources is differentially available to those members of the community who are able to make more convincing claims to belonging. In this context, community members are engaged in an on-going process of making claims to belonging which work by constructing the social space in the image of the claimant as much as by producing the subject. They constitute an important citizenship practice through which subjects assert their rights in various instances of local governance, but they work by constructing the community as well as the citizen-subjects who populate it. Rather than yield clear categories of included and excluded, though, these practices and discourses result in fluid and unstable differentiations among actors, and, in fact, a fluid and unstable constitution of the community as a social space.

Nothing is a sociologically neglected terrain, comprising negatively defined phenomena, such as non-identification, non-participation and non-presence. Nevertheless, these symbolic social objects are created and managed through meaningful social interaction. Nothing is accomplished either by active commission (doing/being a non-something) or by passive omission (not-doing/not-being something). I explore these dichotomous forms through four dimensions of negative social space: non-identity; inactivity; absence; and silence. Paradoxically, nothing is always productive of something: other symbolic objects come into being through the apprehension of phantoms, imaginaries, replacements and alternatives, which generate further constitutive meanings. A sociological analysis illuminates these processes, revealing how much nothing matters.

In Central Asia, the Soviet 20th century tried to master geography, to control politics through economy and to divert sacredness toward profane items. It seems that it has failed on many aspects. In Central Asia, the limits which organize the geo-social space are submitted to constant changes. They are to be considered in the “longue duree”, as well as in short time. The purpose of this article based on various sources, is to highlight the notions of limits, fronts, frontiers in Central Asia in a sociological and anthropological perspective, throwing off the history of the state frontiers building, which is widely studied by historians, geographers, political scientists since the 19th century onward, and renewed since the end of the Soviet Union. So far, we can argue that a Central Asian continuum-space does exist, demarcated by frontlines, administrative fronts and frontiers as well as security, but also social, ethnic, religious, economic, memory, gender limits, accepted by local populations which constantly cross them. These numerous limits and frontiers in Central Asia are more often invisible than visible, allowing us to better understand its specificity.

In October 1998, the first international conference on “Empirical Investigation of Social Space” was held in Cologne, Germany. The motivation was to bring together social scientists interested in both traditional and modern methods of constructing social spaces, in line with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. A particular focus was put on methodological and statistical research on correspondence analysis and its application within the social sciences. This contribution reports on the second conference was held in October 2015 in Bonn, Germany.

A crucial yet often-overlooked starting point for any Bourdieusian field analysis is to relate the field under consideration to the ‘field of power’, so as to enable an examination of its relative autonomy or heteronomy, i.e. its relation to other fields of society and to society as a whole. However, Bourdieu and his successors did not implement this key conceptual consideration systematically, or did so peripherally at best. For this reason both the theoretical and the empirical status of the field of power remain, for the most part, unclear. The fundamental philosophy of ‘methodological relationism’ has not been systematically applied, of all things, to a core element of Bourdieu’s theory of society which basically is a theory of power relations. We argue that a relational approach to the field of power is essential for theorizing the relation between (a) fields and (b) fields and the social space.

The understanding of social reproduction, from a Bourdieusian perspective, is that the dominant typically reproduce their position in social space through various apparatus, such as the education system, to the detriment of the dominated group, who are unable to leave their own position, characterised by inequality and suffering. A key tool in achieving social reproduction is the process of symbolic violence; however, this article considers the effects of inverted symbolic violence. By following the trajectories of two middle class university graduates, this article will demonstrate the detrimental effect inverted symbolic violence has on their graduate employment trajectories. Respondents are depicted as having inflated subjective expectations incompatible with current objective realities within the labour market, resulting in a relatively downward, or unsuccessful, trajectory.

The influence of language on social capital in low-skill and ethnically diverse workplaces has thus far received very limited attention within the sociology of work. As the ethnically diverse workplace is an important social space for the construction of social relations bridging different social groups, the sociology of work needs to develop a better understanding of the way in which linguistic diversity influences the formation of social capital (i.e. resources such as the trust and reciprocity inherent in social relations in such workplaces). Drawing on theories about intergroup contact and intercultural communication, this article analyses interviews with 31 employees from two highly ethnically diverse Danish workplaces. The article shows how linguistic barriers such as different levels of majority language competence and their consequent misunderstandings breed mistrust and hostility, while communication related to collaboration and ‘small talk’ may provide linguistic bridges to social capital formation.

This article explores the spatial status of written texts in the urban environments of the digital age. I suggest that part of what writing does in and for the urban environment in such context is more productively captured by understanding writing not only as a communication technology but a spatial technology as well. I propose the concept of ambient text to ground my exploration of the spatiality of writing in the observational context of a busy New York City street. I then use Manuel Castells’ distinction between the space of places and the space of flows as a useful heuristic to explore theoretically the contribution of writing to contemporary urban social spatiality in the sociotechnical context of the digital age. I argue that writing takes up new spatial roles and can be thought of as an infrastructure that helps the space of places and the space of flows “hook up.” The general argument is that our relationship to written texts is being reconfigured by spatial dynamics for which texts in turn do important work. The idea that texts directly produce social space (the becoming space of writing) leads to an incremental, additive view of social space, which is briefly discussed.

This article concerns an insufficiently studied link in cultural class analysis, namely that between class-structured lifestyle differences and social closure. It employs a modified version of Michèle Lamont’s promising, yet under-theorised approach to the study of symbolic boundaries – the conceptual distinctions made by social actors in categorising people, practices, tastes, attitudes and manners in everyday life. Drawing on 46 qualitative interviews with people from the city of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis focuses particularly on a horizontal boundary-drawing dynamic between middle-class interviewees. It is argued that entanglements of different types of status judgements work both to construct and reinforce social boundaries between class fractions. The findings draw attention to what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the capital composition principle of social differentiation. Though fundamental to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, such systematic intra-class divisions have seldom been discussed in detail in contemporary cultural-stratification research.

The main goal of our approach is to analyse the social representations of alternative rock in Portugal (or, using a terminology more akin to 1980s Portugal, of the “modern music vanguard”) from 1980 to 2010. This is part of broader research into the 30 years of modernization of the country (from the post-revolutionary period initiated in 1974 on), in which alternative rock is regarded as a significant social practice within the scope of the social, artistic and musical structuring of the country itself. We consider that alternative rock is a subject that is illuminated by Bourdieu’s theory of fields, without overlooking its clear interconnection with ‘art worlds’ or music scenes, and the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of late modernity. The article is a pioneering work on the Portuguese sociology of culture, whose results may be the starting point of a debate to problematize the functional logic of popular music in various Anglo-Saxon settings.

Gentrification involves the transformation of neighbourhood social spaces in ways that remake place in line with the needs and desires of new residents and capital investors. While spatial transformations have been well documented in the gentrification literature, temporality has rarely been foregrounded, although social space is also altered by privileging new rhythms and tempos of everyday life. Using a case study of Toronto’s gentrifying Junction neighbourhood, this article explores the restructuring of everyday neighbourhood rhythms around consumption-oriented and place-making events that draw on a collage of ideas about the timespace of ‘authentic’ urban street life. I argue that the reorganization of neighbourhood social life through the creation and privileging of specific temporal landscapes functions as a means of excluding, marginalizing or rendering invisible certain community members and their needs. The inability of some to participate in the new temporalities of the neighbourhood becomes a barrier to recognition and representation, one that both hides and enables the ongoing ‘slow violence’ of gentrification.

Research has pointed to the importance of artists in the early stages of gentrification; however, few studies have examined specifically the meaning of gentrification and place-change from the perspective of artists themselves, and few studies have investigated the role of ‘creative city’ policies as unintended drivers of gentrification processes. This study generates insights into artists’ own views of gentrification processes within the gentrifying bohemia of the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England. We stress that gentrification in this area cannot solely be understood as a process of displacement, but is also clearly linked to the growth of modes of regulation and commercialisation within social space. Increasing regulation, brought about by greater local state focus on ‘creative districts’, has impacted the Valley. Alongside this, projects of property development as well as a general growth in the popularity of the Valley as a nightlife consumption district and area of production for commercially-orientated creative class workers have challenged artists’ values of the area as a ‘secret garden’ where romantically inflected values of self-expression, autonomy, spontaneity and non-instrumental artist cooperation can be found.

We are getting faster, or so we have been led to believe. Planes, trains, and automobiles—alongside the substrates of online modernity—have seemed to suggest to us that the world is a place we are constantly in need of catching up with. In turn, partially in response to institutional demands on productivity, some academics have suggested slow methods in research.1Yet, what if we were never fast in the first place? What if the things and atmospheres of Western industrial modernity actually produce slow ontologies of feeling as we traverse space and place? Straddling history, literature, and (auto)ethnographic attunements to emotions and society, this article attempts to suggest there is a modernity which is slow—an “endless mastication”—in which we, as both subject and subjects, are chewed-up and spat out amid the endlessly deferring signs of the presence and absence of meaning in social space.

China–Canada people flows are increasingly characterized by two-way movement, engendering possibilities and problems, particularly for women juggling careers and lives. Within this context, a qualitative study was conducted to trace the migratory and career trajectories of 15 Chinese migrant women between China and Canada. The study finds that to maximize their career and life spaces, the women endeavored to build and mobilize various forms of capital. Not only did they engage in migratory movement, but some of them also acquired Canadian credentials, moved into entrepreneurship and took up transient jobs. The utility and futility of women’s efforts point to “games” of differentiation emanating across fields, particularly along the lines of gender, race and class that were invoked to produce transnational spaces where existing power relations were simultaneously challenged and reaffirmed. Conceptually, this paper is informed by the concept of transnational social field and gender, race and class analysis.

This article offers a theoretical comparison between field and ecology, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu and the Chicago School of sociology. While field theory and ecological theory share similar conceptualizations of actors, positions, and relations, and while they converge in their views on structural isomorphism, temporality, and social psychology, they are quite different on several other scores: power and inequality, endogeneity, heterogeneity, metaphorical sources, and abstraction. With a fine-grained comparison of the two approaches, this article provides the basis for a continuous dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers regarding the nature of social space, its structural and processual composition, and how it changes over time.

Higher education institutions are thought to rejuvenate and replenish local labour markets with recent graduates, especially in rural locales. While some graduates stay in the area of their alma mater, others return home or to other areas. The aim of this paper is to contribute a synopsis of research results from current peer-reviewed literature on the topic of internal (domestic) migration of the tertiary educated as well as introduce the concept ‘social space’ as a method for facilitating a relational interpretation of graduates’ migration propensity and location choices. Findings from this literature review indicate that regional characteristics, human capital and demographic factors are most often cited as affecting migration propensity and location choices among the tertiary educated. However, the interpretation of these factors is often taken in isolation and from economic perspectives. ‘Social space’, from four philosophical starting points, is discussed as an approach to understanding the interdependence of these factors. Examples of how higher education migration research can develop into different directions by using social space theory from different philosophical perspectives are also discussed.

In a recent paper in The Sociological Review, Atkinson and Deeming argue that tastes in food are homologous to the social space, exactly as it was in Bourdieu's Distinction. This would involve differences in food tastes not only along the class hierarchy, but also a clear-cut divide by the relative weight of cultural and economic capital. However, Atkinson and Deeming base their claims on insufficient data analysis: They misinterpret their own correspondence analysis and the additional tables, which they in turn fail to subject to even the most basic statistical analysis. We show that the results they present are actually at odds with their own interpretations and main conclusions. It is not just that Atkinson and Deeming's arguments lack support; their proposition about a culinary division between cultural and economic class fractions is contradicted by their own data.