ABSTRACT

This paper intervenes in contemporary sociological debates over the relationship between race and class by excavating the early writings of Michael Burawoy. Against the prevailing polarization between twin absolutist models in which either racism or capitalism alone possesses causal force, we argue that Burawoy articulates a third position—one that grants relative autonomy to both racism and capitalism while rejecting their causal reduction to one another. Drawing on Burawoy's empirical work in southern Africa from the 1970s and early 1980s, we show how he theorized race and class not as discrete variables, but as articulated through historically specific configurations of labor, state policy, and political struggle. Probing the limits of his formulations—particularly his leanings toward economic determinism and inattention to racial subjectivity—we do what Burawoy himself always advocated: we reconstruct his approach. We do this by way of issuing three key injunctions drawn from, but going beyond, his work: (1) interrogate rather than assume the coherence of race and class categories; (2) treat racism as a structured contingency embedded within capitalist social relations; and (3) actively align anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles, moving from logic to strategy. In doing so, we argue that Burawoy offers a distinctively Marxist perspective that does not subordinate race to class, but rather insists upon their mutual articulation. This third position opens the door to a historically situated theory of racial capitalism and a more strategic approach to political struggle.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

There have been surprisingly few sustained efforts to explain or theorise the role insurance plays in society. Even the most theoretically inflected insurance scholarship, emanating from governmentality and Actor Network Theory scholarship, tends to be grounded in empirical cases, set in particular periods and places, and it is often ambivalent toward the label of theory. It is surprising both because of the foundationally social character of insurance and because of its sheer heft – economically and politically insurance is everywhere and involved, somehow, in everything. As many working in the field have complained, insurance has not been deemed a central object of either empirical or theoretical enquiry anywhere. In its endlessly variable private, commercial forms especially, insurance is understudied, the overlooked, dull sibling of finance. There is today a still small, but accumulating body of work spread across disciplines but the size of the field measured against the character and scale of the topic itself makes thinking, explaining or theorising insurance generally peculiarly hard. This article uses the concept of articulation, as a descriptive and structurally relational category, to argue that there is a need for more scholarship than reaches across insurance lines, industry sectors and academic disciplines. To do this I recount how two relations - individual/social’, and insurance/finance - have featured in insurance research.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

We document changes in global inequality of opportunity in education for women and men born between 1941 and 1983, using individual-level census and survey data on 46.7 million individuals from 95 countries, representing all major regions of the world. We measure global inequality of opportunity in education as inequality in education due to circumstances beyond the control of individuals. In addition to gender and social origin, we treat a person's country of residence as a circumstance that produces inequality of opportunity, because the country of residence is, to a large extent, beyond an individual's control. We test whether global inequality of opportunity in education has increased or decreased across cohorts. Our results show a decline in global inequality of opportunity. The decline is stronger among women than men, although inequality of opportunity remains higher among women than men.

ABSTRACT

The organisation and distribution of care responsibilities represent a central issue in contemporary welfare debates. Although welfare systems have progressively sought to socialise care related risks tackling distribution's inequality, the organisation of care services received less attention. The organisation of care should be democratic which requires inclusive governance that engages all stakeholders. In decentralised systems such as those in Italy and Spain, the local level plays a pivotal institutional role in shaping care policies, influenced by both vertical and horizontal subsidiarity. This article examines to what extent local governance contributes to the democratisation of care and what are the factors that shape local differences through a comparative analysis of four cities—two in Emilia-Romagna (Italy) and two in Andalusia (Spain)—and across two policy areas: Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and Long-Term Care (LTC). Drawing content analysis of 79 policy documents and 25 interviews, we investigate the degree of care democratisation from a multilevel territorial perspective. Our findings reveal significant differences in governance between ECEC and LTC, largely attributable to supramunicipal frameworks and to the multilevel distribution of responsibilities. Regional traditions and path dependency further shape care arrangements. Nonetheless, the local dimension, particularly the political will, resources availability, and openness to participatory processes, emerge a relevant factors. We argue that national and regional institutions should reinforce municipal capacity to promote co-governance. Moreover, enhancing the inclusion of less-structured and marginalised actors across all levels is essential to advancing a more democratic and therefore equitable care system.

ABSTRACT

Scholars of inequality generally find that lower-class individuals are more skeptical of meritocratic narratives that link economic success to individual work effort. However, past research has yielded inconclusive findings about how economic inequality affects meritocratic attitudes across different class groups. Theories of activated class conflict suggest that class matters more in high-inequality contexts, while theories of relative power suggest that these class-based differences are smaller in more unequal contexts. We argue that past studies have been unable to effectively adjudicate between these theories because they conflate the between- and within-country relationships between inequality and meritocratic attitudes, assume that the impacts of rising and falling inequality are symmetrical, and tend to focus on rich democracies thus limiting important cross-national and temporal variation in income inequality. Using multiple waves of the World Values Survey and multilevel regression models, we build on this prior research empirically by (1) disentangling the cross-country and asymmetrical temporal components of the inequality-meritocracy relationship, and (2) employing a broader sample of developing and rich countries to leverage more variation in country-level income inequality. We find that class-based cleavages in meritocratic attitudes are smaller in countries with higher average levels of inequality. Further, while declining inequality is associated with increased meritocratic beliefs across class lines, we find no evidence that rising inequality suppresses these beliefs. Our results demonstrate how contrasting theoretical frameworks can explain different components of the inequality-meritocracy relationship (i.e., cross-sectional and asymmetrical temporal components). We conclude by discussing the challenges our findings pose for partisans of egalitarian politics.

ABSTRACT

The division of housework reflects both gender norms and spousal relative status, yet most research treats it as static, leaving long-term patterns less understood. This study examines how the allocation of household labor evolves over the course of marriage in contemporary China and how these dynamics vary according to wives' status relative to their husbands. Using four waves of the China Family Panel Studies, we employ growth curve models to trace trajectories of housework among couples where wives hold lower, equal, or higher status than their spouses. Results indicate that the wife's share of household work changes systematically over the course of marital duration. In couples of equal statuses, it slightly rises before declining. When the wife holds a lower status, her share starts higher but decreases rapidly over time. When the wife holds a higher status, her share starts lower but increases steadily over time. Despite early differences, the trajectories converge in later years, and disparities in housework allocation diminish. These findings highlight the dynamic nature of household labor division and demonstrate that marital duration interacts with spousal status asymmetries to produce long-term adjustments in the division of housework. The findings reflect both the spouse's long-term negotiation and the symbolic enactment of gender norms, in terms of housework division, among Chinese families.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

The 2000s have witnessed a significant, worldwide boom in new art museums founded by private, wealthy collectors. While the arts have long been a key arena for the remaking of elite distinction and the reproduction of inequalities, this surge in private museums has sparked much controversy. In this paper, we demonstrate how wealthy elites deploy this form of cultural philanthropy for (self)legitimation. Based on topic modelling analysis, we examine the online mission statements and ‘about us’ sections of 399 private museums across 59 countries to understand what forms of legitimation discourses they construct. We find that, beyond discourses of intra-elite distinction, the mission statements additionally mobilize discursive legitimation strategies that highlight private museums and their founders as reliable, institutionalized agents in the artworld and valuable philanthropic actors in society more broadly. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how the arts function as a particularly versatile and powerful tool for symbolic elite legitimation struggles, allowing wealthy elites from different backgrounds to coalesce globally around private art museums. In light of escalating wealth concentration and widening economic disparities around the world, our paper adds to sociology's critical imperative to scrutinize the formation and reproduction of contemporary elites.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the UK's 2025 Immigration White Paper as a critical site for understanding how immigration policy functions as an instrument of racial capitalism. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the theory of social reproduction, and intersectionality, it interrogates how the state's construction of the ‘skilled migrant’ operates as a racially coded category that privileges whiteness, anglocentric credentials, and neoliberal norms of value. Rather than treating the White Paper as a discrete policy episode, the analysis situates it within a longer genealogy of immigration governance that reproduces structural inequalities across higher education and graduate employment. By tracing how migrant ‘worthiness’ is encoded through racialised and classed proxies—such as language fluency, academic credentials, and salary thresholds—the paper contributes to wider sociological debates on bordering, credentialism, and state racial formation. It demonstrates that the British state's discourse of ‘merit’ and ‘skill’ is inseparable from exclusionary practices that undermine the promise of equal opportunity for racialised citizens and migrants alike. The paper concludes by advancing a forward-looking framework for understanding policy as both a site of intervention and a generator of symbolic and material hierarchies.

ABSTRACT

How do wealthy individuals use offshore financial structures like shell companies to protect personal assets? And how is such offshore wealth structuring itself variably organized? Moving beyond conceptualizations of offshore as concerning only individual tax havens, this article investigates offshore wealth structuring as a fundamentally relational practice to supply the first systematic image of the patterns between two key layers of offshore structures within a specific asset class. We analyze the overseas entities that hold expensive residential properties in the UK to make three contributions to debates around offshore. First, we identify a specific regional offshore circuit in its flows and magnitude by isolating two key layers, namely the entry layer, which is used to connect into the UK property market, and the action layer, which is used for the actual or projected appearance of managing the offshore structure. We next examine the interstices between these layers to reveal three patterns of offshore formations. These we term global funnel, selective gateway, and self-stacker, and we discuss their implications. Finally, we offer indirect evidence of which jurisdictions people are more likely to choose for “brass plate” incorporation and which they employ for more complicated structuring, either in actuality or in appearance, which has implications for policymaking. By identifying significant variation in the interstitial patterns between jurisdictions, we not only pinpoint which jurisdictions are used in relation to others and to what extent, but also provide indirect evidence of how they are used differently and discuss why. Our findings supply a pioneering analysis of the scope, scale, and interstitial formations of the offshore structures that wealthy individuals use to hold personal property.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT

This study employed ideas from narrative sociology to investigate how 31 Norwegian Muslims make meaning of ascriptions by mainstream society. Previous research has addressed the causes and consequences of Muslims' racialisation. However, little attention has been paid to how Muslims derive understanding from ascriptions made by others and how this process influences their self-formation. The participants made meaning by drawing on personal and cultural stories relating to their racialisation and recognition. Interestingly, they merged stories that contextualised their experiences in relation to other Muslims, defined and strengthened a collective identity and blurred essentialised images of Norwegian Muslims and mainstream society. These meaning-making processes illustrate that the self-formation of racialised minorities is shaped by storytelling across different levels of social life and is both constrained by and emerges from social contexts. The findings emphasise the benefits of moving beyond singular voices and ideal types, particularly when studying categories of difference.

ABSTRACT

This paper argues for a re-enchantment of studies of contemporary climate change activism. It focuses upon Christian climate activists in the UK and how they are reinterpreting their theological beliefs in ways that mobilise religious communities. We employ a social movement framing perspective to discover the nature of this ‘interpretative work’ using data from a survey (n = 319) and in-depth interviews (n = 62) with Anglicans and Catholics in three church dioceses, a Christian aid agency, and two Christian social movement groups. We found that familiar ‘stewardship’ framings of Christian climate activism dominated in institutional contexts but gave way to ‘prophetic’ framings in Christian social movements. Prophetic framings of climate activism have received very little attention compared with stewardship, but they provide strong theological justification and a distinct emotional inflection to Christian participation in climate protest, and form a bridge to groups like Extinction Rebellion. Prophetic framings were, however, open to prognostic disputes, and remained within an anthropocentric discourse on climate change. With Christians comprising about one third of the world's population, it is of global significance to the environmental movement that in certain enclaves and across denominations, Christian beliefs are being reinterpreted in ways that can lead to their mobilisation not just as ‘climate stewards’ caring for creation, but as ‘climate prophets’ engaged in political protest.

ABSTRACT

In Sweden, as in many countries, immigrant youth tend to exhibit higher educational aspirations than native-born youth, yet their attainment often falls short of their greater ambitions. This study, resulting from a research project focused on educational transitions in two Swedish municipalities, explores two mechanisms that help explain the aspirations-attainment paradox among immigrant youth. The first mechanism, “cooling out,” involves a lowering of aspirations as youth encounter barriers—either structural or personal—within the educational system, leading them to adjust their goals downward. The second mechanism is “branching out,” which refers to situations arising when immigrant youth become aware of new career paths and educational opportunities as they progress through their schooling. This leads them to adjust their aspirations based on a broader understanding of the possibilities available to them. Using qualitative data gathered through interviews with immigrant students, this study sheds light on how cooling out and branching out unfold as these students reconcile their initial educational ambitions with the realities they encounter. Contributing to a broader understanding of how immigrant youth navigate educational trajectories and transitions, the study reveals that many students actively resist being cooled out by pursuing alternative pathways to their goals and working independently to sustain high ambitions despite discouragement and institutional constraints.

No abstract is available for this article.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 77, Issue 2, Page 410-412, March 2026.