The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Class identity is a crucial sociological concept, but is only ever measured at the individual level. In this paper, we ask: do groups have class identities? And do those class identities correspond with material resources? To answer these questions, we examine data from 31 of the most prominent American religious denominations in the early 20th century. We find that religious groups expressed palpable class identities in their denominational periodicals, and that these identities were broadly aligned with these groups' material resources. This study suggests that studying class identity at the group level can deepen our understanding of inequality—both in the highly stratified field of organized religion, and among organizations and other social groupings more generally.

ABSTRACT

How do those who are pulling away economically justify their advantageous positions? This issue has acquired salience in the context of rising inequalities and propelled a reflourishing of sociological analysis focused on elites. This article contributes to this literature by enquiring into the status legitimations and interconnected boundary-makings of one particular elite fraction: the tech elite. Even though this grouping is at the forefront of a transformation of the field of power, it remains surprisingly underexplored in the social sciences. To address this lacuna, this study undertakes a case study of the prominent startup accelerator ‘Y Combinator’ (YC). This accelerator, which has been shaped by Sam Altman and other leading figures in the US tech industry, not only invests financially in startups but also seeks to provide mentorship and expertise to aspiring founders. The article analyses the latter cultural activities by drawing on interviews, lectures, essays, and blogs from the YC online library. Based on qualitative analysis, three central codification principles are reconstructed from the data. Firstly, successful tech entrepreneurs are treated as missionary selves, a quasi-religious framing which goes hand-in-hand with moral boundaries vis-à-vis actors who are deemed materialist and risk-averse. Secondly, the discourse imagines the ideal tech entrepreneur as talented rather than just hardworking. This creates a cultural boundary which operates within the logic of merit-scarcity and thereby serves to legitimate extreme inequalities and the winner-takes-most markets that dominate the tech industry. Thirdly, tech entrepreneurs are construed as fulfillers of real-world needs of the masses. This framing counters public criticisms levelled at tech and echoes the rhetoric of populist political actors, while also allowing to establish moral boundaries vis-à-vis other elite fractions, such as finance. Finally, the article discusses the reconstructed codifications and boundary-makings in relation to data on the socio-structural positions of actors within the startup accelerator.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

One of the current focal points of ethnicity research is the relationship between ethnic identity and social inequality. This paper examines how immigrants' understandings of ethnicity are influenced by class. Through life-history interviews with 28 Chinese immigrants in the UK, I focus on the experiences and feelings of immigrants from different social classes crossing borders, as well as how these experiences influence their understanding of ethnicity and identity, which often involve ethnically salient situations and the ways they draw ethnic boundaries. By focussing on immigrants' citizenship acquisition and work strategy development, I show three ways that class affects ethnicity: the extent of barriers when crossing borders, the ability to use transnational capital, and the forms of solidarity. This work contributes to the study of the intersection between ethnicity and class, revealing the heterogeneity of Chinese immigrants in the UK from a class perspective.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Work mediated by digital labour platforms is often framed as flexible and autonomous, yet accessing paid tasks commonly requires extensive unpaid effort. Drawing on 65 qualitative interviews with Australian workers on project-based platforms (including Airtasker, Fiverr and Freelancer), we develop the concept of anticipatory labour: the unpaid, future-oriented work through which workers search for tasks, evaluate jobs and clients, and negotiate terms before any paid work begins. Anticipatory labour is not peripheral but constitutive of participation in platform labour markets, demanding sustained time, attention and emotional energy amid uncertainty and competition. We show that anticipatory labour is gendered. While all workers engage in these practices, women perform more anticipatory labour and experience it more intensely, often alongside unpaid domestic and care labour. Women's anticipatory labour is also more affectively charged, shaped by hope, anxiety and self-doubt as they manage risks to reputation, safety and future employability. Men, by contrast, report less anticipatory labour and more confidence in securing work. We argue that anticipatory labour operates as a mechanism of platform governance, shifting responsibility for employability onto workers and converting unpaid time and emotion into the conditions of participation in the gig economy. In doing so, platforms reproduce gendered inequalities while sustaining the promise of flexibility.

ABSTRACT

What is ‘missed’ by sociological literature underpinned by assumptions of presence that a missing approach can rectify? I appropriate a metaphysics of presence and an alternative focus on what is missing as ontological foci to revisit complexity studies in sociology. I review key themes therein and show that, by predominantly adopting a being-laden set of metaphysical assumptions, the complexity discourse overlooks subtler and more nuanced aspects of elucidating social settings. By attuning ourselves to what is missing, I make a case for what the possible consequences of this overlooking might be while showing the theorizing inadequacies of complexity thinking, which rests squarely on tangibility and observability of Aristotelian entities.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Congruence between teacher and student perceptions of student academic attitudes reflects positive teacher-student relationships and enables teachers to adjust to students' needs. This study investigates discrepancies between teacher and student perceptions of student's school enjoyment and effort, and whether these discrepancies are associated with student SES. It also tests one mechanism—student visibility—that may be driving the association with student SES. We draw on representative survey data on children at the end of primary school in England and Scotland and use a residual method to compute perceptual discrepancies. We find that teachers significantly rate the effort and enjoyment of low SES students more negatively and the same attitudes for high SES students more positively compared to what the students' own reports would suggest. The association between SES and teacher-student perceptual discrepancies remains significant even when SES-differences in student visibility, captured through student prior ability and behaviour, are considered.

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, high-income individuals have increasingly sorted into the Democratic Party as a result of their socially liberal views. There is evidence that over time high-income Democrats have also liberalized in their economic attitudes, but the motivations behind this purported support remain unclear. This study uses a forced-choice conjoint experiment with an oversample of high-income respondents and takes the novel approach of pairing the experiment with cognitive interviews in order to explore why high-income Democrats support redistributive policies. Results show that the redistributive preferences of high-income Democrats look very similar to those of other Democrats. They prefer policies proposed by their own party. They want policies that are racially “fair,” and sometimes define this to mean favoring Black recipients. Most of all, however, they are driven by a commitment to “fiscal populism,” the idea that (increased) government spending should be funded by the most elite members of society.

ABSTRACT

In the current context of extreme economic inequality and rising concentrations of income and wealth at the top, the social processes through which elites restrict the wider population's access to resources and opportunities, and the role of exclusive organisations in maintaining cohesion among a select few, have important implications for social inequalities. Drawing on 41 semi-structured interviews with wealthy members of the business class living in and around Manchester in northern England (21 of whom were members of a CEO peer group), I analyse how three social processes—homophily, structured reciprocity and therapeutic cultural resources –make and legitimate cohesion between members, as well as instances of when cohesion fails. In doing so, I explore how therapy culture has travelled upwards, to the executive and owning class, through CEO peer groups. I make the case that CEO peer groups represent a fruitful entry point into wider debates about class formation for the contemporary business class in the UK and, given their global scope, more broadly.

ABSTRACT

Starting with Du Bois, scholars of race have investigated the role of White ignorance as it perpetuates White supremacy. Today, Charles Mills and scholars continue this inquiry by expanding the importance of White ignorance to include multiple forms. This article contributes to this inquiry by highlighting the role and types of White innocence. We argue that White innocence functions in two ways that generate and justify White innocence, narrative and consumptive innocence. We use St. Augustine, Florida, and Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to outline the contours of narrative and consumptive innocence. Through the paper, we find that global White supremacy is operating in similar, yet local ways based on place-based histories that produce the two types of innocence. We conclude by connecting this research to the larger Du Boisian sociology as a liberatory practice.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 182-184, January 2026.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 177-179, January 2026.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 175-176, January 2026.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 1, Page 180-181, January 2026.

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to assess how different forms of state power shape public health outcomes during a global crisis. Drawing on Michael Mann's distinction between infrastructural and despotic power, we construct a typology of states and evaluate its predictive power for COVID-19 vaccination rates in 161 countries across three pandemic periods (2021, 2022, 2023). Our analysis shows that infrastructural power—a state's capacity to coordinate society and implement policy—was associated with higher vaccination rates, regardless of its level of despotic power. However, the relevance of different state capacities varied across periods: economic resources were critical for securing doses during early scarcity, infrastructural capacity was key for distribution once vaccines became widely available, and low-despotic states proved more successful at “vaccinating the margins” during the final phase. These findings demonstrate that Mann's interactive conception of state power offers a sharper analytical lens than standard proxies like GDP or health security indices, and they reaffirm the role of infrastructural power in effective governance amid transnational crises.