Search

Young people form the primary target demographic of new ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt’s significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people’s economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people’s wellbeing. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

DIY and alternate cultures are important social spaces to study because they are where young people can find themselves when they feel like they do not fit in and where they can find like-minded peers with whom to work, make and play. DIY and alternative cultures are also key objects of co-optation and value creation, where resistive and creative practices are denuded of their artistry, politics and emotional authenticity, repurposed through immaterial labour, and resold as aesthetics and affects. Beginning by situating the analysis in wider conceptualisations about late capitalism's business ontology, this article contributes to unpacking these processes firstly by making a theoretical/methodological distinction between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’. I then develop the affects of ‘youthful culture’ not only to conceptually rethink how youth cultures still play a role in the lives of young people in terms of identity formation and everyday forms of escape and creativity, but also to highlight processes of co-optation, commercial culture and how figurative distortions of youth create value in late capitalism. As ‘youth’ is conceptually cut loose from age brackets, it becomes an affect operationalised for an array of vested interests. Importantly, what is often left out of considering co-optation are the actual physical bodies and everyday emotions of living, breathing young people from whom these affects are extracted. This article will discuss these aspects using empirical examples from research on punk and hospitality showing how the immaterial labour that ‘youth’ enacts in these spaces is exploited from backs of the physical and creative labour performed by young people themselves, aspects of which they are sometimes reflexively aware and are attempting to negotiate.

This article critically engages with the Australian Cultural Fields project and the book Fields, Capitals, Habitus to make suggestions as to what future research on consumption practices needs to consider, including the place of young people; increased material inequality and its implications for cultural production; the development of consumers participating in cultural production; and the importance of considering emotions and affect in Bourdieusian sociology.

This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers’ intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised by workers that is connected to the requirement that workers be ‘fun’ at work to facilitate consumption and to support the labour of co-workers. This sociality also shapes access to employment. However, the way that this takes place sheds light on divisions within the service labour force, in which employment opportunities are distributed through a social ‘scene’ that excludes migrant and ethnic minority workers. Involvement in this scene places the relationship between the public and the private in workers’ social lives into a constant tension, but exclusion increases vulnerability to poor working conditions and exploitation. The article concludes by arguing that the relationship between the public and the private in the practice of affective labour is not dissolved so much as posed as a problem that workers must negotiate within the disciplinary requirements of labour in specific industries and the modes of embodied inequality shaping the service labour force.

This paper explores the experiences of queer workers in the service economy with a focus on hospitality labor. Studies of gender, sexuality and service labor approached mainstream service work as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality, while literature on the position of queer workers has tended to approach work in terms of structural inequalities that prevent queer workers from participating in the labor market, and has therefore focused on notions of diversity and inclusion as frameworks for understanding how the heteronormativity of service relationships can be overcome. This paper shifts focus to examine how queer subjectivities are enacted within the disciplinary requirements of service labor, and on the way that workers negotiate and contest their positioning at work. The paper situates the subjectivities and laboring practices of queer workers at the nexus of tensions between heteronormativity and the politics of diversity in service venues, and examines how workers negotiate and contest their positioning at work. We explore the normativities that shape permissible queer embodiment at work and show how biographical experiences specific to queer workers inform their laboring practices. The paper shows that queer workers in mainstream hospitality venues are enrolled into a specific mode of interactive service labor that capitalizes on their queer biographies, requires highly cultivated relational capacities, and repositions work as a site of political intervention.

While Australia has experienced low COVID-19 case numbers relative to other countries, it has witnessed severe economic consequences in the wake of the pandemic. The hospitality industry, in which young adults are overrepresented, has been among the most affected industries. In this article, we present findings from an interview and a digital methods-based study of young hospitality workers in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Newcastle who lost shifts or employment due to the pandemic. We argue that the participants’ ability to cope with the loss of work was mediated by the degree of family support that they could access, with some experiencing the pandemic as an inconvenience, while others suffered extreme financial hardship. Findings from this study show that the most severe impacts of the pandemic play out along pre-existing lines of inequality and marginality, causing the most severe consequences for those who were already most vulnerable to them.

This chapter makes the case for the importance of an ‘affective Bourdieu’ firstly by arguing why considerations of affect are buttressed by Bourdieu (or at least a theory of practice) and why Bourdieu’s theory of practice also needs a better conceptualisation of affect. It then outlines antecedents for the theory of affective affinities, especially pointing to Mason’s work on affinities. The chapter then presents a table of Bourdieu’s concepts with their definitions placed alongside new definitions that highlight affect. Overall, this chapter sets the scene for theorising the concept of affective affinities as important for considering the connections between class, emotions and affect.

Chapter Four develops the understanding that Bourdieu’s forms of capitals have affective properties and propensities, arguing that they need to be understood as skills and capacities for lubricating success in a particular field, and emphasizing how capitals work in the specific everyday moments and encounters where relationality matters and class is made, patrolled and reproduced. The forms of capitals that Bourdieu and others have developed are themselves ‘affective’ in that how they work stems from an assemblage of material, temporal, spatial, and relational factors and their affects. Affective competence is the embodiment of hierarchical social relations that explain how social magic happens. The chapter also argues that what is traditionally theorised as capital convergence is an affective transference that transmit relations of distinction and the maintenance of who gets to define morals, ethics and values.

Explanations of inequality in higher education primarily use the dominant language of institutional equity discourses, such as low socio-economic status (LSES), ‘under-represented’ or ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. We argue that analysis that relies on a static series of objective categories regularly fails to account for the symbolic-historical conditions that have produced class boundaries. In acknowledging this, one of the challenges in higher education research is to illuminate how working-class understanding of education systems is brought into universities, and how it relates to, and is contested by, the dominant middle-class culture of the university. We propose a Bourdieusian-inspired class analysis be adopted for Australian higher education that focuses more closely on the way in which symbolic power is distributed through the misrecognition of species of capital as symbolic capital. Using this approach we argue that universities, rather than ameliorating class difference, are a poorly understood site of its generation.

This article explores young people’s consumption of credit and the role of credit and debt in the distinction between youth and adulthood. The article engages with recent shifts in the nature of credit that have turned credit into an object of consumption in itself, as well as broader arguments about the financialisation of daily life, in order to understand the temporalities and moral distinctions enacted in different forms of credit and debt among youth. While it is well recognised that financialised capitalism operates and creates value from differences including gender, racialisation and class, the formation of youth subjectivities through credit and debt technologies remains unexplored in the literature despite an emerging crisis of consumer credit among young people. With this in mind, this article draws on a qualitative study of youth, credit and debt, to show that young people experience debt within contradictory temporalities and calculative logics, including the long-term ‘investments’ required to become an adult, and the logic of consumption attached to consumer credit which positions credit as a failure of self-responsible adulthood because it places future creditworthiness in jeopardy. In this way, the article suggests a future research agenda on the way that biographical distinctions are enacted through credit and debt, and how notions of youth and adulthood contribute to the qualification and consumption of credit. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Chapter One focusses on underutilized concepts of illusio, social gravity and social alchemy/magic to consider everyday affective notions such as aspirations and orientations as key to thinking about how everyday processes of embodied meaning making are central to the affective economies that create and replicate inequalities. The chapter argues that Bourdieu’s concepts of social magic and social gravity are relations of affective affinity, unequal moments are settings heavy with the hierarchical transmission of affects. Illusio is especially useful for considering economies of intensity, motivation and purpose.

Chapter Seven makes the argument, like many others, that the dominant figures used to stand in for humans, such as Homo economicus and cultural dupe, are anthropological monsters. The chapter also sketches the problem of the figure of the inspirational meritocrat, which aligns with the rise of the happiness and wellness industries and with individual stories of heroically overcoming hardships in movies and media profiles. The Bourdieusian model of the reasonable accumulated being is then put forward as a way of overcoming the problems of those figures as it considers how affective affinities mediate everyday struggles and strategies that move beyond the rational, ideological and entrepreneurial.

Chapter Six considers aspects of social change through a Bourdieusian lens. It outlines the autonomous and heteronomous poles of fields, emphasising their affective nature. The chapter uses the examples of subversive innovators and how the importing of illusio from different fields can affect an individual’s disposition to illustrate how change occurs. It then examines recent social changes around the rise of reflexivity, irony, cynicism and anxiety. In a precarious global labour market, where even the well-educated experience forms of insecurity about the future, reflexive and ironic ways of being are becoming normalized, while mental health issues effect an ever-greater proportion of the population. This produces a relation of cruel optimism. If the illusio of specific fields increasingly come under scrutiny as being unachievable, unsustainable or violent, this may open a space for emancipatory social change.

Chapter Two builds on the traditional definition of habitus and on its recent developments to argue that habitus needs to be thought of as an affective reservoir of immanent dispositions, where affinities stick and are primed across an emotional trajectory to instinctively react in some situations or reflexively deliberate in others. The chapter emphasises oft-overlooked aspects of habitus such as conatus and the cathectic, and points to how different orientations towards illusio can be an important limitation for an individual’s practice. The sensations and feelings we experience in certain social situations accumulate in dispositions over time. Dispositions are therefore enacted, that is they emerge or spring forth at any given time through affinities. Habitus is essentially an antenna to detect the feel of a space, a capacitor that stores affinities and a transformer that then regulates an array of performative dispositions.

A Bourdieusian contribution to studies of affect provides a more comprehensive understanding of the everyday moments that make, transform and remake the social contours of inequality, and how those relations are contested and resisted. By teasing out the affective elements already implicit in concepts like habitus, illusio, cultural capital, field and symbolic violence, this book develops a theory of affective affinities to consider how emotions and feelings are central to how class is affectively delineated along with material and symbolic relations. This includes theorising habitus as one’s history rolled up into an affective ball of immanent dispositions, an assemblage of embodied affective charges. Sketching fields as having their own affective atmospheres and structures of feeling, while considering everyday settings that the concept of field cannot capture. Drawing upon illusio, social gravity and social magic to unpack how the embodied nature of the forms of capital mean they operate in affective economies mediating transmissions of affective violence. The book concludes by critically engaging with aspects of social change due to the rise of reflexivity, irony and cynicism and proposing the figure of the accumulated being to challenge the dominance of homo economicus.

Chapter Five considers how tastes, ethics, morals, values, aesthetics and the like are all key to thinking about modes of distinction and the dissemination of symbolic violence. These phenomena are situated as an affective economy, where engagements and entanglements with things and people in specific social spaces summon emotions and feelings that are the very moments where inequalities shift from being immanent and imminent to being present and felt. Symbolic violence is therefore an affective violence. The chapter discusses the concept of social death and how tastes and morals are relations of affective affinity. The experience of symbolic violence is an affective experience of lack, that is, a lack of sticky affinities with the ‘right’ things.

This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in ‘front of house’ bar work. Through their work as bar staff at ‘hip’ inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a ‘vibe’ of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie’s call for the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour to be explored and highlight the ways gender relations including the heterosexual matrix of desire are mobilised in the production of value in young women’s bar work. We discuss the tensions at play in this context where women are required to generate both a positive and a pleasurable feeling in their interactions with others while negotiating the complex politics of heterosexual desire while at work, including managing and negotiating harassment from male customers. This management requires complex sensate and embodied practices that are both conscious and unconscious (described, for example, as an ‘instinct’), involving constantly ‘scanning’ and ‘reading the crowd’ and monitoring their own embodied and affective responses to particular men while they carry on other conversations or pour drinks. We argue it is critical to study the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour in order to expose the ways relations of inequality can be mobilised in the production of value in this context.

This article contributes to discussions of place and social change in rural sociology with a focus on the local politics of rural land use. In particular, the article explores the way that one rural place is responding to changes in the local and regional economy connected with the arrival of extractive industries such as mining and coal seam gas (CSG). The article shows how attitudes towards extractive industries are formed through notions of place and community within broader narratives concerning rurality and global capitalism. The local politics of land use enrols complex and contradictory forms of place attachment into the articulation of competing narratives about rurality, and intervenes in the local social relationships of rural areas. The politics of extraction in rural Australia is therefore situated at the forefront of contemporary economic and cultural changes that are part of the reshaping of place amid the broader dynamics of contemporary global capitalism.

As conflicts emerge over land use when extractive industries arrive, what counts as legitimate knowledge about the risks generated by these developments becomes important to how individuals formulate their opinions. This article analyses knowledge, risk and perceptions of future land use in the Narrabri Shire, a rural area in Australia. In a risk society, especially a ‘post-truth’ one, the production of knowledge, whether scientific, political, media or commercially driven, does not provide more security and certainty, but more insecurity and uncertainty. This article uses Bourdieusian concepts informed with theoretical insights about affect and emotion to understand how reflexivity about risks and environmental politics are interpreted. Land use practices are emotional for some local farmers, where their ‘sense of one’s place’ is structured by their deep connection with the land and is therefore structuring of their land use politics. For others, their response may be couched as more economically...

Young people investing themselves in DIY cultures have to negotiate the complex but now normalised nexus of employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while maintaining space in their lives to pursue their creative and artistic passions. This article presents research with young people in an underground music scene across Australia who are balancing economic pressures with their desires to generate and uphold DIY and punk-influenced activities in a networked community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Many of the participants actively ‘choose poverty’, that is, they knowingly and strategically make decisions that ‘keep overheads low’ to free up temporal and mental space to continue to be creative. Their ideas of being successful are not expressed in material terms, but are contingent upon a future where they continue to have the opportunity to invest themselves in their interests even if that means living in relative poverty. Using the oft-ignored Bourdieusian concepts of illusio, struggle and strategy, this article provides a case study of some of the ways young people deal with the risks and opportunities of a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting a hopeful attitude towards the future.

A decade ago, scholars such as Michael Woods suggested that mobilisation in response to development in rural spaces was the result of a redefinition of relations between individuals, communities an...

In this article, we draw on a study of the transition experiences of young Indonesian musicians to argue that the social capital of creative youth may be productively understood in relation to reflexivity and temporality. This is particularly important if they move to other locations to further their careers. In brief, we offer three key contributions to social capital debates. First, social capital—as defined by Bourdieu—is most important as a valuable form of capital to deal with both actual and anticipated Beckian risk. Second, in fields of creative struggle, the development of social capital is closely related to possession of strategy and reflexivity as a form of cultural capital. Third, social capital cannot be operationalized effectively by youth without the element of timing and the temporal capacity to reflexively recognize and seize opportunities as they arise at critical moments of a creative career.

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of bo...

This article argues that to better investigate the enduring relationship between social class background and inequalities in post-compulsory education necessitates a more comprehensive approach to thinking with Bourdieu, but also a need to move beyond his seminal, much used concepts. Through meta-analysis, we review how Bourdieusian theory has been used in widening participation research in mainly Anglophone contexts, and consider how including concepts from his wider ‘toolbox’ can aid this pursuit. We consider new theories and concepts that have emerged largely after Bourdieu and their appropriateness for research in Australian higher education. We explore how a ‘practice-based’ theory of widening participation might be developed, drawing on the work of Schatzki and Kemmis which permits researchers to usefully consider the internal goods of a practice and the role of institutions and the non-human. We also suggest that incorporating intersectionality, as both a social theory of knowledge and an approach to analysis, facilitates exploration of routine practices and struggles and reveals the complexities, provisionality and becomingness of social positioning, subjectivities and change. Such theoretical extensions to Bourdieu’s legacy enable more nuanced understandings of how complex and intersecting social inequalities in higher education are realised or challenged in countries beyond the global north. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article contributes to recent debates about the relationship between affective labour and class by exploring the classed distinctions enacted through affective labour in the urban night-time economy. Bringing theories of affective labour into a dialogue with Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the article explores the affective and symbolic dynamics of hospitality labour in a gentrified inner-urban neighbourhood of Melbourne, Australia. It shows how the practice of hospitality labour enacts classed distinctions and tensions emerging from the gentrification of inner-urban areas, and how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of class contribute to the valorisation of affect in hospitality venues. The valorisation of affect are processes in which the value attributed to an atmosphere or consumption experience is based on the forms of distinction practised within the venue, enacted in aesthetics, tastes and modes of embodiment. The article also shows how practices of class distinction – both ‘punching up’ and ‘managing down’ – are connected to the gendered politics of service work in the way that workers manage the threat of violence or sexual harassment in venues. In general, the article shows how the classed dynamics of gentrification are enacted in affective economies, and therefore how Bourdieusian analysis of class can be usefully deployed in theoretical debates about affective labour.

Using ethnographic and interview data, this article explores hopes for the future of young Indonesian musicians. The young people are seen to consider their future trajectories in multiple, hierarchical music fields. The article also takes into account the ontological insecurity of jobs as a professional musician, arguing that there is continuous reproduction of a doxa, namely ‘survival of the fittest’ in Indonesia. Yet despite abundant risks to livelihoods, young Indonesian musicians expressed optimistic views about the future. The analysis of data below bridges the gap between the traditionally separate youth studies fields of youth transitions and youth cultures. Our interpretation critically contextualises the dialogue between these two fields based on the experiences of young Indonesian musicians as a part of the Global South.

Ulrich Beck was one of the most influential sociologists of recent decades. Concepts he developed – including risk society, individualization, cosmopolitanization, subpolitics and the democratization of science – are among the most cited, used and contested in contemporary sociology. In the wake of Beck’s recent death, this review article revisits his key contributions and legacy. He proposed that a momentous shift to a new modernity has begun and challenged sociologists as to whether the concepts they use are up to the task of tracing this emerging dynamic. Provocatively, Beck asked whether concepts like the nation-state, family and class are functioning as ‘zombie categories’, continuing on in sociology but no longer relevant to social experience. We argue that Beck was not denying the significance of such social factors, but setting a challenge to the discipline to show how the key concepts of sociology can be reimagined in the face of social change.

Cote has called for a focus on a political economy analysis, where young people should be thought of as ‘youth-as-class’. Cote positions youth as having false consciousness, arguing that youth studies is too focussed on subjectivities and a potential apologist for neo-liberalism. While we acknowledge the central importance of economic considerations, this paper critically engages Cote’s claims while developing an approach to political economy that recognises the importance of inequalities between young people. We engage with a number of Cote’s claims arguing that his position underestimates the diversity of work in this area and the importance subjectivities to any analysis of political economy. We also identify a number of conceptual problems with ‘youth-as-class’ and the ‘false consciousness’ heuristic. We develop an alternative approach outlining a more integrative understanding of the relationship between the political and the economy highlighting the importance of subjectivity. We draw on ide...

This chapter argues that Sarah Thornton's notion of sub cultural capital is still very useful for understanding and describing notions of authenticity, coolness and distinction within sub cultural fields. It presents a case study of a do-it-yourself (DIY) independent music scene in Newcastle, Australia with local, national and global networks, focusing on one young person's attempt to pursue a DIY career. The chapter discusses the ways Pierre Bourdieu's forms of capital are invoked to formulate a niche creative cultural space and to manage threats from outside and within this field'. Thornton sketches out sub cultural capital as a development of Bourdieu's formulations of cultural, social, economic and symbolic capital to cast a closer eye on the symbolic economy of 1990s UK dance culture and the ways in which hierarchical taste cultures are produced and maintained. Thornton highlights how forms of media circulate sub cultural capital, while formal institutions circulate cultural capital.

This chapter examines an Australian hardcore music scene by combining concept of distinction with the notion of youth reflexivity. It argues that the binding and bonding of the straight edge oath forges a strong resilience in the subculture, while demanding a heightened reflexivity from those in the hardcore scene who are not straight edge. The chapter explores reactions in the broader hardcore scene to those who identify as straight edge, and highlights a moral economy of classification struggles that engenders processes of reflexivity. Young people in late modernity exercise a high level of reflexive surveillance over themselves and their lives. Torkelson interviewed young Americans who had left straight edge subculture. He found that they had made the decision as a result of existential reflections, disillusioning experiences with more fanatical performances of straightedge, and by simply coming of age'.

This article discusses young people's attitudes towards the future in terms of two distinct risks: on the one hand, their perceptions of achieving their ambitions, on the other, their perceptions of the future of the world, particularly in terms of environmental issues. The data are discussed as a disjuncture between these issues where the positive perceptions of the likelihood of achieving ambitions are rarely linked to their pessimistic visions of societal collapse. This is discussed through the lens of social theories about risk, reflexivity, ambivalence and governmentality. It is argued that the ‘experts’ in young people's lives – namely parents, teachers, politicians and media – discursively create a hierarchy of risk that legitimises individual choices about managing one's own life trajectory while delegitimising action towards large scale social issues. Despite considerable awareness of coming environmental problems and frustration over inaction, young people tend to prioritise the management of in...