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Information systems (IS) can amplify or reduce social justice by limiting or expanding access to material and nonmaterial resources. Using the lens of symbolic and social boundaries, we focus on the role of cultural discourse in demarcating and contesting boundaries associated with IS design and adoption. We examine news media-based journalistic discourse surrounding contact tracing systems implemented in South Korea and Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a process model of technology-centric contestation. We found that public contestation over competing societal values, including public health, individual rights, and social justice, influenced how contact tracing systems were adopted and redesigned. Through the (re)design and adoption actions, symbolic and social boundaries were demarcated and contested. Our study illustrates the critical role of news media in counteracting the consequences of IS design and adoption decisions that limit access to resources for marginalized social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing concern about the proliferation of radical groups and violent content on social media platforms such as YouTube. These platforms present unique capacities to promote radicalised content, as they allow the flourishing of digital creators who amass large audiences and communicate their ideas in a compelling video format. Notwithstanding, consumer research has not yet provided a conceptualisation of such antagonistic online consumer gatherings in the ephemeral social media context. We investigate this phenomenon by combining netnographic sensibility with digital methods to explore the case of pro-gun YouTubers in Brazil. We propose the notion of online consumer counterpublics, which are online consumer collectives socio-technically shaped and promoted by social media influencers and their audiences on social media platforms based on strong oppositional discourses, ideas, affectivities, and values associated with a consumption topic, and who develop a compelling counter-hegemonic social identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I introduce and explicate the concept of "class blindness," and show how it works to obscure and justify class inequality even in a small community in which social divisions are well recognized. Similar to the concept of color-blind racism, class blindness is a discursive strategy to erase and minimize class privilege and the social processes by which class inequality is created and perpetuated. Denial of these processes, and the social-structural roots of class advantage and disadvantage, undermines efforts to effectively address societal problems born of social class inequality. I show how class blindness allows those with privilege to police their social positions and secure resource hoarding within a community while holding the disadvantaged personally responsible for their struggles. I further describe how class blindness allows advantaged individuals to express concern about social problems including poverty and inequality in the abstract, while acting in ways that contribute to its perpetuation on the micro and the macro levels. This qualitative case study, based in 84 interviews and 10 months of participant observation with individuals across the class spectrum, illustrates the processes that contribute to the reproduction of social inequality even among those whose ideological stances include commitment to its reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to investigate how welfare stigma is produced and counteracted in the public sphere in a social democratic welfare regime. The Norwegian case represents a generous welfare state that historically has been thought to lessen and avoid stigma connected to welfare benefits. While studies have identified a hardening anti-welfare consensus and stigma production in liberal welfare regimes, we know less about how the connection between welfare benefits, stigma production and resistance has played out in the recent developments in the social democratic welfare regime context. Public debates give access to a dynamic political battleground where different actors participate, and we analyse six welfare-related national debates covered in Norwegian newspapers between 2010 and 2019. We identify key stakeholders, symbolic boundaries used to distinguish deserving from undeserving recipients, and we discuss the outcomes and wider functions of these debates. The debates contain moral aspects of welfare and allegations of fraud by recipients in general as well as by targeted groups such as Somali single mothers, refugees and young adults. We find that stigmatizing framings known from other national contexts also enter the Norwegian debates and illustrate how welfare stigma production plays a role in promoting more selective welfare policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Scholars posit that lower-income undergraduates experience "cultural mismatch," which undermines their sense of belonging, promotes withdrawal from campus, and limits mobility upon graduation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 103 undergraduates at an elite university, we examine how students' diverse trajectories to college affect how they identify as members of the community and modulate the relationship between social class and sense of belonging. While upper-income undergraduates find commonalities between themselves and college peers and integrate into the community, lower-income students offer divergent accounts. The doubly disadvantaged—lower-income undergraduates who attended local, typically distressed public high schools—felt a heightened sense of difference, drew moral boundaries, and withdrew from campus life. Alternatively, the privileged poor—lower-income undergraduates who attended boarding, day, and preparatory high schools—adopted a cosmopolitan approach focused on continued expansion of horizons and integrated into campus. Through detailing this overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates, our findings expand theoretical frameworks for examining sense of belonging to include boundary work that shapes students' agendas, thereby deepening our understanding of the reproduction of inequality in college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion and diversity have become paramount within the festival sector and beyond, often focusing on bringing together a diverse group of people within one space. Within leisure studies, there has been a longstanding interest in leisure as spaces where people meet "others." Nevertheless, previous research found that physical proximity is often not sufficient to enable social mixing. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach combining urban planning and design with cultural sociology and leisure studies, this article addresses how music festival organizers produce spaces of encounter within festival spaces. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 31 organizers of music festivals in Rotterdam. Findings indicate that organizers use their knowledge of spatial design and symbolic boundaries to stimulate or block movement of audience groups, which affects segregation and mixing of audience groups within a festival. Spaces of encounter therefore are consciously designed through symbolic and social boundaries that have spatial consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores motivations for second-hand clothing practices using wardrobe interviews with a limited sample of twelve higher-education students in Belgium. Three types of practices were identified: bargain hunters, uniqueness searchers and ethical and ecological buyers. The study reveals that despite the perceived sustainability of second-hand clothes, these practices often result in large volumes of clothing purchases, contradicting sustainability motivations. Ecological respondents experience 'affective dissonance' due to a disconnection between their sustainability beliefs and fashion practices. These uncomfortable emotions reveal an aspiration to engage in more sustainable fashion practices in the future. Despite this, all respondents evaluate their second-hand clothing practices by relying on the culturally prevalent discourses of the first-hand fashion industry. The study concludes by highlighting the implications for the development of alternative and more sustainable fashion practices when second-hand clothing practitioners reproduce the symbolic boundaries that govern the first-hand fashion industry, and the authors suggest pathways to address these implications in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is characterized by specific expectations in the realm of gender roles and sexuality, expectations which can be interpreted as heteronormative symbolic boundaries between the LDS Church and the world at large. In this article, through qualitative interviews, we explore the ways 27 women who leave the Church are influenced by, respond to, and ultimately reject some of the symbolic boundaries. We found that many women struggle with gendered expectations regarding home, careers, with norms regarding heterosexuality and sexuality within marriage, and gender identity conformity expectations, rejecting them at different times in their lives. Intersecting with the life course, we demonstrate how the interaction between the rejection of these symbolic boundaries and experienced social boundaries in the form of exclusion from the family, community, and church-related institutions contributes to deconversion and shapes its consequences afterward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctorate forms the basis for academic careers and the regeneration of academia, and has increasingly become important for other sectors of society. The latter is reflected in efforts on institutional, national as well as supranational levels to change and adapt the doctoral degree to new expectations. As doctoral education is embedded in research, changes in governance and funding of research further affect the doctorate. The evaluation of the doctoral thesis appears, however, to have remained true to the academic tradition: an examination committee exercising their gatekeeping in a ceremonial setting. This study sets out to explore doctoral examination committees' evaluation practices. Insights were gained through six focus group interviews with experienced examination committee members at three large research-intensive universities in Sweden. Of particular interest is how the object of evaluation is formed, the nature of the boundary-work conducted, and variations in examination practices related to different and changing conditions for research and doctoral education. Our results show how the object of evaluation emerges through a gradual interpretation of the thesis and defence, becoming more complex and nuanced as the process of evaluation progresses from its initial stages to the final closed discussions of the committee. The finalised object of evaluation, only fully present at the conclusion of the closed meeting and hence transient in nature, encompasses the research contribution, educational achievement, and academic competence of the candidate. Furthermore, the boundary-work conducted in this process often transcends the object of evaluation to include also supervision and the local context for doctoral education and research, and hence contributes to upholding, and potential changing, norms in research fields, educational contexts, and academia at large. This extended boundary-work intensified as problems and inconsistencies were discovered during the evaluation process. The ceremonial staging underscored the gravity of the decision and the extended boundary-work. Despite changing conditions for the doctorate, our findings highlight the importance of the practice of evaluation committees, and the disciplinary communities to which they belong, for upholding and negotiating norms in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I extend the established concept of performativity by focusing on the origins and micro-level interactional strategies of marketing objects. In product markets wherein face-to-face interactions between buyers and sellers are impossible, profit-seeking firms depend upon marketing objects—and on their packaging stories—to interact with buyers. While much research focuses on the particular effects of performative marketing objects on consumers, I explore the conditions required for such effects to emerge. In this project, I employ a richly descriptive case study design by focusing on a transnational specialty food firm based in Indonesia and examining the complete collection of food product packages (N = 81) that communicate with buyers on behalf of its products for sale. I understand marketing practices as helping to create the phenomena they allegedly describe, and thus contribute to object-oriented marketing theory through a dramaturgical analysis of packaging talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a normatively-informed theorization of people-making as a (blocked) collective learning process. More specifically, people-making, namely the mobilization of individuals into a collective actor, draws symbolic boundaries around the sovereign, thereby contributing to the imagination of 'the people' in more inclusionary or exclusionary ways. To account for differences along this continuum, Habermas' notion of collective learning is introduced, resulting in the conceptualization of inclusionary (exclusionary) people-making in terms of (blocked) collective learning processes. The authors supplement Habermas' account and situate it in the context of people-making by arguing that shared stories, in particular their underlying genres, can produce more or less (un)certainty, which in turn enables or blocks collective learning processes. Drawing on Frye, four genres are distinguished: romance, comedy, tragedy and irony. The theorization of how genres are variously associated with uncertainty leads to the argument that mobilizations drawing on romance and, to a lesser extent, comedy can be expected to block collective learning processes, thus to be more exclusionary. In contrast, mobilizations relying on irony and, to a lesser extent, tragedy, can be expected to enable collective learning, thus to be more inclusionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational class formation has been a subject of considerable interest in recent years. This article provides the theoretical and thematic framework to the special theme on 'Transnational class formation: identities, practices and symbolic classifications' and presents a review of current literature on transnational social classes, arguing that we need to complement this literature by also considering transnational class‐making. We introduce several theoretical approaches and concepts, emphasizing the role of (self‐)classification, distinction, symbolic boundaries and intersectionality for analyses of transnational class‐making. Drawing on the contributions collected in this special theme, we conclude by presenting some potential challenges and unresolved questions concerning the issue of transnational class formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on qualitative interviews with sixty-two first-generation Dominican immigrants in Switzerland and forty-five in the Netherlands. The paper aims to analyze symbolic boundaries within the Dominican community, examine the factors influencing these boundaries, and compare the Netherlands and Switzerland to identify similarities in this process. In both contexts, respondents employed constructs related to socioeconomic status, gender, migration trajectories, the perceived level of integration of coethnics, and coethnics' income generating activities to create internal distinctions. Sex work and time of arrival constructs emerged as specific constructs of the Swiss context. As argued, we found that socioeconomic status, gender, immigration regimes and labor market opportunities, and racist integration discourses contribute to internal categorization. Pre-migration experiences play a role in perpetuating divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do social hierarchies emerge from symbolic boundaries? Based on an ethnography of a college party scene, we consider "Who parties with whom" as a way to trace the micro-interactional bases of status stratification. Based on field observations and 60 interviews with college women and men in Boston, USA, we identify two main modes of partying: "crawling" and "climbing." Crawling is the search for a low-status house party to attend, often leading to subpar experiences in poorly-maintained frat houses. Climbing, in contrast, describes the aspirational movement into superior parties at elite institutions, an experience potentially marked with feelings of shame. Regardless of their frequently bad experiences, students continue to go out with the goal of "getting in," which we analyze as an exchange of capitals—bodily, cultural, and social—for access to exclusive spaces. The pursuit of college parties, we discovered, forces students to position themselves in hierarchies of desirability, and through this process, they learn to connect wealth, status, and campus affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws upon cognitive maps and interviews with 57 residents living in two diverse areas of Porto, Portugal, to examine how individuals' symbolic neighborhood boundaries reflect policy and planning decisions, and the implications of recognizing the role of government in the creation of territorial divisions and inequality. The study shows that residents' subjective neighborhood constructions reproduce political territorial practices and representations. Awareness of the political origins of territory discourages residents from constructing their neighborhoods in alternative ways. Drawing on the concepts of symbolic and social boundaries, the study sheds light on the persistence and contestation of unjust territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces the articles in this thematic issue, which revolves around the ERC Advanced research project Becoming a Minority (BaM), carried out between 2018 and 2023. The aim of the project was to understand how people without a migration background think about and live in diversity. Through this aim, the BaM project has tried to advance our thinking about the concept of integration.

Abstract: Research on transgender identity and community boundaries has developed steadily over the last decade, but many of the inquiries center around personal identity boundaries and development rather than collective boundary drawing. To understand how and why gendered symbolic boundaries are drawn and enforced in shared spaces, I collected and analyzed qualitative data from thirteen in-depth interviews with trans people in gender support groups in the United States. I investigated the symbolic boundaries that members of gender support groups draw around who “counts” as trans, who is welcome in the groups, and factors that influence boundary drawing. I found that trans participants engage in high amounts of emotional work, that I term gender confirmation work, to uphold their gender identities in a cisnormative world. Consequently, gender support groups function as space of rest from work, and boundaries are drawn to ensure rest inside the groups. My study on gender support group membership boundaries advances new terms to describe trans people’s response to gender-based harm. My findings also demonstrate how trans people—a marginalized population—employ group strategies for navigating cisgender-dominant society.

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining symbolic boundaries: boundary retention—entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—innovating new forms of symbolic distinction. Traditional approaches to measuring symbolic boundaries—interviews, participant-observation, and self-reports are ill-suited to detecting fine-grained variation in boundary maintenance. To overcome this limitation, we use the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to develop a novel approach to measuring symbolic boundaries based on interactional language use between group members before and after they encounter one another. We construct measures of boundary retention and reformation using random forest classifiers that quantify group differences based on pre- and post-contact linguistic styles. We demonstrate this method's utility by applying it to a corpus of email communications from a mid-sized financial services firm that acquired and integrated two smaller firms. We find that: (a) the persistence of symbolic boundaries can be detected for up to 18 months after a merger; (b) acquired employees exhibit more boundary reformation and less boundary retention than their counterparts from the acquiring firm; and (c) individuals engage in more boundary retention, but not reformation, when their local work environment is more densely populated by ingroup members. We discuss implications of these findings for the study of culture in a wide range of intergroup contexts and for computational approaches to measuring culture.

Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status consumption, making boundary-crossing a source of cultural capital. Consequently, the right to adopt a practice from a culture that is not one's own is determined on the basis of the costs and benefits one is presumed to accrue. People express disapproval at boundary-crossing if they believe it devalues or extracts value at the expense of the target culture. We call this process cultural tariffing. We test our theory in a between-subject experimental design, demonstrating that individuals who enjoy a privileged social position, as inferred from their social identity or socioeconomic status, have less normative latitude to cross cultural boundaries. This is explained by perceptions that these actors are either devaluing or exploiting the target culture. While symbolic boundaries and cultural distinction theories are inconsistent with our results, we find that Americans who are disenchanted about group-based social mobility are the most likely to be outraged by cultural boundary-crossing. Cultural tariffing, we therefore posit, is a form of symbolic redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a considerable body of literature on symbolic boundaries that engages with long-established/newcomer configurations, work on conviviality has only rarely taken this angle, despite its general focus on contexts of immigration-related diversity. This article connects these works of literature by examining insider-outsider configurations between long-established residents and newcomers in two very different contexts of rapid demographic change, where the established population is already marginalized and feels further threatened by newcomers. Drawing on ethnographic research in Newham, UK, and Mshongo, South Africa, we advance debates on conviviality by revealing how perceptions of inequality, lack of civility, and lack of reciprocity shape symbolic boundaries against newcomers, which may, in turn, be softened by convivial practices. We also consider what the differences between the sites might reveal about the enabling conditions for conviviality in such neighbourhoods.

Building on a field perspective, this article adopts a relational approach that lets us make sense of food charities' interconnections, relationships and social positioning. I analyse how food charities working with different models of provision do boundary work and resolve the cognitive dissonance arising from simultaneously competing and collaborating. Making use of several semi-structured interviews, I illustrate how Trussell Trust food banks, independent food banks and pantries' directors mark symbolic boundaries when illustrating their models of provision vis-a-vis other models (e.g. pantries vs food banks) but build symbolic bridges when discussing the ultimate ends of charitable food provision. This strategy lets them resolve the tension arising from two contradictory stances and is representative of what I call 'hunger bonds': relationships of cooperation and mutual help that also permit positional returns to be obtained and strategically advance a specific vision of the field order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of the Israeli case, this paper explains why states add superfluous provisions that facilitate naturalization processes after military service. The Israeli Citizenship Law states that military service in Israel will confer exemptions from the list of requirements toward naturalization. Amendments in 1987 and 2004 and 35 proposed revisions also link military service with citizenship in Israel. I argue that those provisions were enacted mainly for symbolic reasons. Republicanism is not just a characteristic of a particular polity but a rhetorical trope for politicians in that state. In Israel, politicians wanted to emphasize the importance of republican participation, particularly through military service, as the ultimate sacrifice in constructing national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their arrival in Germany as guest workers, women of Turkish background have been subject to stigma and discrimination. Based on interviews with 20 mothers of Turkish background in Germany who send their children to private schools, we reveal the complex experience of stigma and discrimination interwoven with the experience of immigrant motherhood and parenting in educational institutions. We then analyze the stigma-countering strategies adopted by mothers in Berlin's private schools. We argue that mothers of Turkish background who send their children to private schools respond to stigma and discrimination by capitalizing on their own privileges: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and aspirational global cultural capital. While they adopt strategies motivated by their understanding of "good motherhood," they deemphasize ethnic boundaries and emphasize class status with boundaries often drawn against "uneducated" and "Middle Eastern" immigrants, aiming to reposition themselves as members of a privileged international group in Berlin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As dominant group members, Whites tend to experience race as a low salience identity, particularly in interactions in White settings with other Whites. Using data collected from in-depth interviews with White partners in interracial relationships, this paper analyses what happens when Whites enter non-White settings and become racially marked. How do Whites understand the meaning of their Whiteness in these settings and what strategies do they use to manage others' impressions? White participants reported experiencing hypervisibility, a sharp awareness of their racial identity, and heightened apprehensions about being perceived as potentially racist and culturally inept. Consequently, participants made conscious changes to their behaviours (e.g. body language, food consumption), speech, and appearance as a means of signalling a "good" White identity and establishing belonging in spaces where they were marked as racial and cultural outsiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a considerable body of literature on symbolic boundaries that engages with long-established/newcomer configurations, work on conviviality has only rarely taken this angle, despite its general focus on contexts of immigrationrelated diversity. This article connects these works of literature by examining insider-outsider configurations between long-established residents and newcomers in two very different contexts of rapid demographic change, where the established population is already marginalized and feels further threatened by newcomers. Drawing on ethnographic research in Newham, UK, and Mshongo, South Africa, we advance debates on conviviality by revealing how perceptions of inequality, lack of civility, and lack of reciprocity shape symbolic boundaries against newcomers, which may, in turn, be softened by convivial practices. We also consider what the differences between the sites might reveal about the enabling conditions for conviviality in such neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on theories of symbolic boundaries, this article explores the role of the state as gatekeeper to social programs, such as public housing. Using interviews with 75 randomly sampled households living in public housing in Honolulu County, we link contemporary research on gatekeeping with decades of work on how housing policy drives residential outcomes for marginalized groups. In particular, we consider the largely unexamined case of "local preferences," which fast-track certain individuals into social programs based on locally established criteria. Our data suggest that these prioritization categories have evolved over time and are now largely focused on providing housing to those experiencing homelessness and victims of domestic violence. Ultimately, this apparently mundane bureaucratic process mediates relationships between social service agencies, individual needs, and overwhelming housing demand, all collaborating to construct symbolic boundaries across which deservingness is defined and adjudicated. We find that waitlist prioritization criteria cannot be reduced to a basic assessment of need as it necessarily instigates issues of definition (e.g., what is homelessness?) and legibility (e.g., how does one prove homelessness?). These collateral issues amplify the importance of institutional social capital and, in some cases, generate conflict between and within eligible communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyse how collective illness identities are created and sustained among people with type 1 diabetes using sociological perspectives on identity formation and symbolic boundaries. Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews, we show how collective illness identities are established and maintained through both inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms. Informants discussed their collective illness identity by invoking common experiences and interests while also establishing experiential, biomedical and moral boundaries that distinguished them from other social groups. In particular, we highlight how the informants distanced themselves from type 2 diabetes on the basis of the latter's status as a 'lifestyle disease'. Our findings demonstrate the importance of boundary work for collective illness identity formation and the management of stigma, and the ambivalent relationship between illness identities and biomedical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines morality in taste judgements. In response to Bourdieu's analysis of France in the 1960s, sociologists note that repertoires of moral evaluation vary across contexts. They typically highlight national variations, like Nordic egalitarianism weakens cultural boundaries, and temporal variations, with transformed values having made cultural hierarchies less defensible. The article investigates a neglected type of moral variation: contrasting cultural areas. In a study of class and culture in Stavanger, Norway, the authors combined oral interviews on taste with photo elicitation in the visual arts, literature and housing/architecture. While interviewees were often careful not to appear disdainful of other people's tastes, and expressed ambivalence about cultural boundaries, their thoughts on housing/architecture diverged. Here, people did not hesitate to criticise other people's taste, even to the point of ridiculing their houses. The authors discuss the implications for Lamont's symbolic boundary perspective, which is predicated on a separation of three types of symbolic boundaries (cultural, socioeconomic, moral). Morality can both weaken and reinforce cultural boundaries, depending on the areas under investigation. In conclusion, the authors suggest ways cultural sociology may conceive of different moral modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the local turn in migration research. It explores how the city context shapes migration attitudes among residents, resulting in the formation of imagined communities of ‘Locals’ and ‘Others’. Relying on qualitative research methods and cultural sociological theories of cultural armatures of the city, cultural repertoires, and symbolic boundaries, we examine the cases of two Czech cities, Teplice and Vyšší Brod. We find that the specific characteristics of the local history, geography, and demography of the cities give rise to distinct cultural repertoires that shape how their residents view migration and the presence of people with a migratory background in their city. We identify two prevailing cultural repertoires, local cosmopolitanism in Teplice and Czech nativism in Vyšší Brod, which inform both the patterns of boundary work towards residents with a migratory background and their positioning on local hierarchies of otherness. We argue that to understand the role of local context in the formation of migration attitudes, it is not sufficient to study only the characteristics of cities; how these characteristics are made meaningful by the people who live in them should also be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cosmetic surgery is nowadays a “commercial enterprise” (Fraser, 2003) and a practice depicted everywhere in popular culture, from newspapers (Leem, 2016) and women’s magazines (Sullivan, 2001) to TV shows (Tait, 2007; Heyes, 2007; ElfvingHwang, 2013) and social media (Nischwitz et al., 2021; Voinea, 2021). In this article, I am studying how Romanian plastic surgeons responded to the digital solution which was widely enforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. By using the interview and applying a content analysis on Instagram content, I explore the legitimization repertoires employed by plastic surgeons to justify their skeptical attitude to telemedicine, a pandemic fix that challenged traditional medical practice. Most surgeons rejected telemedicine because of its discordance with how they understand the patient’s body, namely a material entity that requires to be physically assessed, touched, measured, drawn, cut, and sewn (as in tailoring). They were still receptive to other telemedicine related tools, like consultations hosted on social media / video conferencing platforms and digitally mediated medical education (which I see as a “before and after” stage in telemedicine). However, an important distinction arose. Young plastic surgeons were more open to adopting telemedicine as a means to expand their careers, which drove them to take a disapproving (and reciprocal) stance against the more experienced but digitally circumspect physicians. I argue that the Coronavirus pandemic and the wave of digitalization following it have emerged as unique socio-historical junctures which unraveled a specific manner of conceiving the body “material”. In addition, the distinctiveness of telemedicine when used for cosmetic surgery and the internal criticism within the professional body of plastic surgeons were also revealed. By mobilizing the concept of symbolic boundaries (Lamont & Molnár, 2002), I introduce a new classification of plastic surgeons: the digitally compliant and the digitally reluctant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates ethnic boundary perceptions among people without a migration background living in majority-minority neighbourhoods in six western European cities. The main research question is whether people without migration background who have contact with migrant groups in their everyday life surroundings perceive ethnic boundaries as blurred (i.e. individuation) or as bright (i.e. culturalisation). The main argument of this article is that boundary perceptions are importantly shaped by the specific urban micro-setting in which people come into contact with migrant groups. Drawing on data from a large-scale survey conducted in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Malmo and Vienna, the study examines how urban micro-setting affects ethnic boundary perceptions (i.e. individuation or culturalisation). The results show that contact with migrant groups in parochial spaces is significantly and strongly related to the blurring of group boundaries (i.e. individuation), while exposure in public spaces has no significant effect on boundary perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative research study examines how volunteering and nonvolunteering is associated with immigrant perceptions of their integration into US society. The study analyzes 24 semi-structured interviews to explore differences in social integration experiences and perceptions of social integration between immigrant volunteers and nonvolunteers. The study's theoretical framework is intersectionality, and the conceptual framework consists of social integration, rational choice, and symbolic boundary theory. While past studies assert that volunteering increases feelings of social integration, this empirical study offers a comparative perspective between immigrants who volunteer and those who do not. Study findings suggest that formal immigrant volunteers build a stronger sense of agency in their social integration journeys through their contributions to American society. Data suggest that most nonvolunteering participants achieve minor benefits by engaging in informal volunteering outside of organizational auspices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction present key research questions addressed by the Special Issue: What is the character of the symbolic reproduction of racial, ethnic and/or national boundaries and how are they interwoven into international migrants' practices, experiences, and strategies within Europe's lowwaged workplaces? The four IS papers address this question from different perspectives; three of them by drawing on materials from the food production industries in the Scandinavian countries and the UK, the last discussing how Polish labour migrant in Norwegian society are objects of 'gray racialization' setting them apart from the majority population. A main contribution of the SI lies in the bridging of disparate literature in the fields of labour markets, migration, and social and symbolic boundary processes: The in-depth qualitative analysis demonstrates how migrants working in low wage, low skill labour markets are the object of ongoing processes of othering along racial, ethnic and national lines. Various agents representing the majority society - the state, employers, trade unions and local communities - each in their own ways contribute to these processes and thereby to the reproduction of social inequalities. Combined, the SI papers also demonstrate the role the migrants themselves play in the production and reproduction of these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical stream of scholarship from North America and Europe, on employer preferences for low-wage labour migrants, suggest that the discourse of 'the migrant work ethic' works as a euphemism for the exploitability of this mobile, flexible and deferent workforce. In this article, we combine the literature on employer preference and the symbolic boundary approach, to tackle the question of how employer preference for the 'migrant work ethic' gains legitimacy. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within the fruit and vegetable industry in Norway, we detail how employers narrate the declining employability of the domestic working class, and how migrant workers ascend into the 'good worker' category. The recruitment and hiring decisions of the employers form part of a broader moral economy of establishing boundaries to the categories of desirable and undesirable workers. We document how employers establish legitimacy for their recruitment preferences through this boundary work. We argue that this boundary work gains its legitimacy as part of a wider moral economy of 'employability.'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructed from scratch on land reclaimed from the sea, Songdo was planned to embody new 'smart city' life. In reality, it has come to exemplify enclave urbanism that commodifies securitised living for upwardly mobile middle classes. While the political economy of this urban project is by now well studied, the sociological ethnography of the resultant space and its experiential correlates remains less developed and imperfectly contextualised. One needs to connect the dots of power and space. The present paper aims to do that and thematises the 'design of everyday life' which rests on (1) the intensification of privatised digital surveillance of mass housing compounds which in turn occasions (2) the remaking of spatial markers and symbolic boundaries between private/public, inclusive/exclusive, inside/outside. As such it is a combination of two different registers of visibility that gets jointly orchestrated by the public–private partnership of Korean state and corporate actors. In order to recognise these regimes as strategic visions of controlled social life we extend James Scott's notion of 'seeing like a state' to include the corresponding regime that we call 'seeing like a corporation'. This allows us to show that they are mutually elaborative in Songdo through a hybridised fabrication of its lived environment, particularly in the case of one branded housing typology located in the city's centre called International Business District. This elucidates not only the local entrepreneurial urbanism that gave rise to the controlled environment of Songdo but also more general logics of the 'compressed modernisation' in the region which sets a global mode for production of space and re-territorialisation of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we seek to exercise reflexivity in migration research by looking at the symbolic boundary work that sustains laypeople's understanding and use of specific labels. We do so through a qualitative, cultural sociological investigation of migration attitudes in Czechia. We explore the labels foreigner, migrant, and refugee, commonly used labels in Czech migration discourse. In short, we argue that research participants rely on different grounds for boundary work, informed by available cultural repertoires, when characterizing foreigners, migrants, and refugees. While boundary work related to the label foreigner calls upon criteria of citizenship and perceived cultural closeness, the boundary work concerning the other two labels—migrant and refugee—involves the moral criteria of deservingness. Our study addresses three major shortcomings in migration studies. First, the opinions of laypeople influence public policies and approaches to migration, yet in-depth qualitative studies of migration attitudes are scarce. Second, even though migration attitudes shape the character of the receiving context for people who cross borders, how laypeople engage with labels remains understudied. Finally, we heed the call for a 'reflexive turn' in migration studies, arguing that researchers must remain reflexive, not only about labels they use, but also how such labels are understood and used by research participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to the problems of exclusion and building frontiers in urban space. At the same time, the focus of the study is concentrated on the systematic nature of the formation of cultural exclusion zones at different time intervals in the history and culture of the Apennine Peninsula, that is, on the territory of the modern Italy. The reflection of exclusion in the city, which occurs throughout the urban history of Italy, is reflected and fixed in the history of Italian culture and art and in the phenomena of building physical and symbolic boundaries, marginalization and appropriation of space associated with this phenomenon. This work is intended to prove the need to transform the erroneous position that exclusion is characteristic only of a modern city, a megapolis as a product of globalization, while the exclusion of an individual in an urban environment and the development of urban civilization are two interrelated and simultaneous processes that are developing over the centuries. Taking into account the affects and experience of fixing exclusion in the urban cultural spaces of the Apennine Peninsula, the author comes to the conclusion that the history of urban culture fixes the presence of exclusion, which is characteristic of the individual living in the urban space from the very moment the city appeared and the corresponding subject-centric urban culture, the existence in which unfolds in the space of subordination, overcoming borders or resistance to the social order it gives rise to. All of these factors also affect the identity of the subject of urban everyday life. Italy, traditionally understood as the cradle of civilization and world culture, provides one of the most representative experiences of building, fixing, reflecting and experiencing exclusion in the urban environment due to the evolutionary process of changing and crossing different cultures.

Widening participation policies often depict access to elite universities as an inherently inclusive force, particularly for disadvantaged women who have been underrepresented in prestigious degrees. These agendas promise not only access but also social inclusion, with a key aspect being interactions with affluent peers. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates at an elite Chilean university and using Michèle Lamont’s approach to symbolic boundaries, this article explores the two facets of boundary-drawing dynamics between economically elite and widening participation-admitted female students. The results identify the criteria and perceived properties of these boundaries, highlighting the intersectional role of gender. While strong and durable class boundaries exist, the analysis shows the seemingly contradictory dynamics of ‘segregated inclusion’ for widening participation-admitted female students. These insights challenge binary views of inclusion and exclusion, highlighting the dual character of these institutions: elites reinforce existing ties through resegregation, while disadvantaged students are socially included but in a segregated manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of elites is enjoying a revival at a time of increasing economic inequality. Sociologists of education have been leaders in this area, researching how affluent families position their children to compete favorably in a highly stratified higher education system. However, scholars have done less research on how students do symbolic work of their own to bolster elite status. In this study, we use qualitative interviews with 56 undergraduates at Harvard and Stanford Universities to explore how students construct a status hierarchy among elite campuses. Students come to campus with a working knowledge of prestige differences between top institutions but then are influenced by others to refine their perceptions. We find that Harvard and Stanford students value universities that offer a ‘‘well-rounded’’ liberal arts education while criticizing other selective institutions for being, alternatively, too intellectual, connected to the old-world status system, overly associated with partying and athletics, or having a student body too single-minded about career preparation. Our findings suggest that through constructing these nuanced perceptions of elite universities’ distinctiveness, students justify their rarefied positions and contribute to the ongoing status distinctions among social elites more generally.

Using ongoing interviews and focus groups, this longitudinal study examines perceptions of eight students entering a state-serving, public university about the role of social class in identifying symbolic boundaries in different layers of the environment (e.g., from small group to school-wide) in the transition from high school to college. Findings reveal that while diverse students from different, public high schools perceived boundaries in high school that fostered bonding capital, in their transition to higher education, they perceived a difference in the (a) permeability, (b) content, and (c) salience of symbolic boundaries in a public institution, which fostered bridging social capital and an environment conducive to cross-class interaction. In addition, classed microsystem boundaries in high school seemed to cloud mesosystem boundaries, leading to perceptions of lower sense of belonging in high school as a whole. Findings provide insight into ways institutions may work to promote interaction across class diversity and student belonging on campus by adapting classed boundaries within environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how young adults who are consumers of K‐Pop in three culturally diverse cities (Paris, Philadelphia, and Manchester) reshape their symbolic boundaries to face social challenges. Analyzing data from 132 interviews, we show how young adults mainly confront social exclusion in Paris, fight racism in Philadelphia and deal with xenophobia in Manchester. Although K‐Pop adds to the dynamics of exclusion due to being perceived as culturally foreign, our participants use K‐Pop as a resource to reshape social boundaries towards new forms of inclusion. They do this by relying on K‐Pop as a cultural product that promotes inclusion, and on their affiliation with the K‐Pop community on a local and global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined representations of medicinal cannabis users in UK newspapers, 1990–1998. It is important to understand the significance of these newspaper articles during this early stage of the growing cultural normalisation of medicinal cannabis use, in the UK, which is not documented in the existing literature. This is a very different period in relation to access to information for members of the public because it was before the widespread use of the internet. The significance of these dates is also that I started interviewing medicinal cannabis users in 1998, which led to Coomber et al. (2003). Very significantly, almost half of the participants in that article indicated that newspapers were the source of the idea that cannabis was medicinally useful and that this accounted for why they began to use it medicinally. What was in those newspaper articles that encouraged this view? In the current article, I examined 60 newspaper articles about medicinal cannabis use, using a thematic analysis which also draws on aspects of critical discourse analysis. I report on the process of symbolic boundary work which negotiates the ambiguity of individuals portrayed as social insiders but who used cannabis. The representations within the articles emphasized the social insider characteristics of medicinal cannabis users, emphasized their genuine illnesses/impairments, but interestingly also articulated misunderstandings by the journalists which contributed to a positive portrayal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Franciscan missionaries in California has traditionally either emphasized or excused their use of physical violence on indigenous people. This paper adopts a "boundaries" approach to highlight and explain how Franciscans were able to both advocate for and eschew physical coercion on the same target audience without any perceived contradiction. The paper argues that unidirectional group boundaries, often mundane and unproblematic, may, in some instances, validate a paradoxical combination of external voluntarism and internal coercion when employed institutionally. The study concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these theoretical concepts to religion and coercion in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Building on previous work about cultural informalisation and the growing urban–rural divide in western democracies, this article studies symbolic boundary work as performed by white youths living in rural areas in the Netherlands. We conducted a micro-sociological analysis of how these youths celebrate regional festivals in the Netherlands, and particularly the meanings they attach to their affective displays of intoxication and sexuality. We show how distinction is 'done' here by many of these youths taking pride in drinking too much beer, sexual directness and impropriety, which they argue are expressions of conviviality and down-to-earthness. In doing so, they appear to be finding dignity and redemption in an image of themselves as savages and reappropriating it as part of their own 'civility', contrasting their revelry with what they perceive to be urban, middle-class snobbery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]