ABSTRACT

Due to their geographical dispersion, many families face challenges in exchanging support over long distances. While family theories emphasise the importance of a systemic approach to family relationships, reciprocity—a core feature of these relationships—is still predominantly studied within specific dyads, such as the parent-child relationship, rather than within the broader family network and its spatial context. This study addresses this gap by examining whether family members reciprocally exchange material and emotional support, and how these exchanges relate to spatial characteristics at three levels: the individual (past migration, degree of urbanisation), the dyadic tie (physical distance between members) and the network (spatial dispersion). Using a national sample of 549 adults living in Switzerland, who named important family members and identified available support, we apply a multilevel network approach. Results show that only reciprocity in material support declines with residential distance when controlling for both in-person and remote contact. Moreover, reciprocity is more likely in large, tightly-knit families, and—specifically for emotional support—in spatially dispersed ones. This last finding suggests that reciprocating emotional support is a key mechanism through which families maintain long-distance relationships. Another takeaway is that cultivating mutually supportive ties must be understood not only through dyadic distance and contact between individual members, but in relation to the spatial and network context of the family as a whole.

ABSTRACT

Elites are increasingly visible in academic and political discourse owing to their disproportionate power in shaping policy. For the most part, however, elites have been viewed in race-blind terms. In this paper, we advance a racialized perspective on elite studies by highlighting three salient ways that race matters for elite views on inequality and redistribution. First, we focus on elites as racialized actors whose racial identities impact their perspectives on social policies. Second, we examine the effect of holding a historical perspective of racialized inequality on elites' redistributive preferences. Third, we highlight the importance of attending to the racialization of social policies, distinguishing between redistributive measures framed in race-neutral and race-conscious terms. We demonstrate the utility of a racialized approach to elite studies by analyzing survey data collected from political, economic, and civil service elites in South Africa. Findings show that elites' racialized identities shape their redistributive preferences, as do their historical understandings of racialized inequality, but these effects vary depending on whether elites are evaluating race-conscious or race-neutral policies.

ABSTRACT

Studies consistently find family background differences in educational attainment, with parental education being an important factor in families' educational decision-making processes. Alongside parents’ own resources and accomplishments, research has shown that both immaterial and material resources from extrafamilial connections, such as extended family members, are positively associated with children's educational attainment and may compensate for a lack of resources within the immediate family. In this study, we examine the compensatory role of parental workplace ties in shaping children's educational choices. Using full population register data from Finland, we find that children from lower-educated families are more likely to enrol in higher education if they have a parent working among highly educated colleagues. We discuss the importance of diverse environments for educational mobility and aim to shed new light on the role of weak ties in educational decision-making.

ABSTRACT

There is increasing recognition of the use of family violence by children and young people, and the need to build the evidence base on understanding this form of violence. Adolescent family violence (AFV, also referred to as adolescent violence in the home) refers to the use of violence by a young person against another family member within the home, and can include physical, verbal, emotional, psychological, financial and/or sexual abuse and property damage. This article presents findings from a secondary analysis of data from the Adolescent Family Violence in Australia (AFVA) study—the first national study of the nature, prevalence and impacts of AFV in Australia. The AFVA study involved an online survey of 5021 young people aged 16–20. Drawing from a subset of this survey data, this article aims to better understand how correlations between disability, poor mental health and use of AFV relate to young people's experiences of child abuse. The findings provide further evidence that young people's use of family violence in the home is interrelated to their own family violence victimisation during childhood. Findings presented here reiterate the need to recognise and respond to children experiencing family violence as victim-survivors in their own right. Early and age-appropriate child-centred interventions would create opportunities to mitigate adverse outcomes, including poor mental health and the intergenerational transmission of violence.

ABSTRACT

This paper uses Bourdieu's concepts of cultural and social capital to critically examine death administration in the UK. Death administration relates to a set of tasks that bereaved individuals (usually a family member) must complete when someone dies-such as probate, asset management and funeral planning. It is a hidden form of administration which is complex, contradictory and often challenging to complete. Drawing on data from qualitative research, the paper shows how death administration is a relational activity which requires people to draw upon and transmit different forms of cultural capital (embodied, objectified and institutional) across life and death. Such capital is strongly mediated by family, and by a bereaved individual's ability to mobilise a wider set of social networks and resources. The article concludes by highlighting the ways in which the overall volume of capital bereaved individuals possess affects their ability to successfully navigate death administration. By bringing Bourdieu's theory of cultural and social capital together in a new empirical area, and by illuminating capital transmission across the boundaries of life and death, the paper offers an original conceptual contribution. By analysing new empirical data on death administration, the paper also extends the substantive focus of research on death and dying.

ABSTRACT

Childcare benefits are an important policy instrument to increase the use of formal childcare and often women's participation in the labour market. However, lower-educated parents continue to make less use of childcare benefits and subsequently less use of formal childcare services. We argue that lower-educated parents are potentially less knowledgeable about childcare benefit regulations, a knowledge gap that may be explained by educational differences in access to childcare benefit information through parents' social networks. Analysing a representative sample of parents in the Netherlands, we find that lower-educated parents indeed have less knowledge about childcare benefits than more educated parents. We also find that while there are no educational differences in access to strong ties (e.g., family and friends) and weak ties (e.g., acquaintances and neighbours) as sources of information, lower-educated parents benefit more from weak ties for knowledge acquisition than intermediate and higher educated parents. We discuss our findings in light of the current debate on the relevance of systemic knowledge about welfare state services for reducing societal inequalities.

ABSTRACT

A significant body of literature highlights the fluid and adaptable nature of racial categories in Latin America, often invoking the concept of ‘whitening’ to explain how upwardly mobile individuals reshape their racial or ethnic identities by adopting cultural and social traits associated with class privilege and ‘whiteness’. This study builds on these discussions. Drawing on 42 interviews, it examines the racial imprints of class mobility within Lima's dominant class, focussing particularly on ‘Mestizos’ in the sample. I show that upward mobility has distinct racialised effects for this group, especially when contrasted with the experiences of their ‘Afro-Peruvian’ counterparts. Whereas for the latter, upward social mobility engenders little change to their racial status, for ‘Mestizos’, it involves shedding the stigmatised racial label ‘Cholo’. Rather than achieving a symbolically higher racial status, for ‘Mestizos’ mobility prompts a process I term ‘decolouring’, characterised by distancing from racial stigma and navigating a heightened sense of racial ambiguity.

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, non-voting among the British working class has increased substantially, contributing to widening class-based inequality in electoral participation. This study examines the impact of occupational class mobility on the intergenerational transmission of electoral participation in two ways. First, by applying Diagonal Reference Models to data from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study covering eight General Elections. Through this, we estimate the impact of mobility on the relative influence of class of origin and class of destination. Second, by examining patterns of non-voting during the early years of adulthood in order to estimate the degree to which class patterns of non-voting among occupationally mature adults reflect processes of prior self-selection, rather than the pattern of non-voting associated with occupational class of destination. The findings indicate that upwardly mobile individuals are more likely to vote, but only after they have experienced occupational mobility into the middle class, thus suggesting a process of acculturation into the class of destination that diminishes the influence of their class origins. Conversely, individuals who are downwardly mobile from the middle class are less likely to vote. However, this lower level of participation is already apparent earlier in life, before they experience adult occupational mobility. This suggests a pre-existing pattern indicative of selection effects. These dynamics, in the context of balanced patterns of upward and downward mobility, reinforce class inequalities in electoral participation and suggest that relative differences in turnout between social classes are likely to remain stable or even widen.

ABSTRACT

In the last several years, disaster insurance programs around the world have experienced disruptions that many observers interpret to be a primary symptom of “climate crisis” (Bittle 2024). Governments have responded to these disruptions through disjointed and at times contradictory measures: they treat disasters, alternately, as “Acts of God” that should be a collective responsibility, or as the result of decisions that can be attributed to individual agency. This article argues that such shifts between mutualism and individualization in disaster insurance are symptoms of an “irrationalization” of disaster policy. The concept of irrationalization, derived from the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe (1973), describes the process of goal identification and policy formulation of contemporary states as they navigate simultaneously valid but ultimately contradictory principles of political morality and governmental rationality. Through case studies of two disaster insurance programs in the US—the National Flood Insurance Program and property insurance in California, which covers wildfires—the article shows that irrationalization processes are becoming more marked as disasters grow ever larger and costlier, fueled by climate change and other anthropogenic causes. It also suggests that the concept of irrationalization offers insight into the emerging forms of “climate crisis” that are unfolding in disaster policy and other domains. The concept of climate crisis is frequently invoked to designate the ruptural change that will follow from global warming, and to both summon and justify radical action to address problems that are attributed to a particular causal or moral agent. But in the context of the irrationalization of disaster policy, technical and moral attributions are uncertain and disputed. Disasters generate political conflict and crisis-driven reorganization rather than decisive courses of action.

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how working-class young people enroled at college in London, Rochdale and Morecambe perceive of university. It argues that university represents a great risk, associated with high levels of debt, which does deter some students, but at the same time, university is imagined as a meaningful vehicle for dignity and respect, which students place greater value on than the prospect of benefitting from the so-called “graduate premium”. Broadly, then, it argues that the desire to attend university is predicated on three factors: the calculation of risk versus reward, the “migrant effect” for the children of migrants or those who migrated directly, and thirdly, the pursuit of dignity and respect.

ABSTRACT

How are capital and the family interconnected in contemporary capitalism? In this article, we argue that they come together in owning relations. By owning capital across generations, families bridge the temporal gap between the durability of capital and the finite lifespan of private property holders and thus resolve the problem of bona vacantia. We posit that the ownership of capital influences the structure and practices of families. Vice versa family centered ownership of capital actively shapes economic processes. Making sense of how capital and the family are interlinked contributes to our understanding of the perpetuation and concentration of wealth as well as of contemporary forms of political economies. Lastly, we point to the social inequality stemming from family-centered owning relations and explore potential alternatives.

ABSTRACT

In the past decade, scholars of international migration have made remarkable strides in unpacking the complex infrastructures that channel cross-border mobility by investigating the operation of profit-oriented migration industries and the regulatory tussles of multilevel migration governance. However, little work has combined the insights of both to reveal how they interact to facilitate or inhibit the growth of particular migration regimes. This article integrates the two strands by reconceptualizing them as part of the same global field, which offers resources for exploring how the struggle for profit intersects with competitions over regulatory capital. It clarifies these dynamics through a case study of the sale of citizenship to wealthy individuals. Focusing first on the involvement of regulatory capital in the competition around economic capital, it shows how and with what outcomes countries and firms cooperate or compete in the system, leading to program resilience or risks. Then turning to the involvement of economic capital in competitions leveraging regulatory capital, it reveals how global powers can influence the citizenship policies of other countries and how third powers dominate in different ways, impacting program growth and profitability. The upshot offers greater traction for examining the limits of state sovereignty and reveals how migration regimes are produced within uneven global playing fields structured by fundamental doxa.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the possibility of justice for the wretched of the earth. Using escrevivência (writing the experience/existence) and drawing on the theoretical insights and political praxis of the Assessoria Popular Maria Felipa (APMF, Maria Felipa Advocacy Group)—a Brazilian abolitionist organization led by Black activists—we analyze how the criminal justice system perpetrates violence against our communities and systematically denies them access to justice. Moreover, we examine the concept of Justiça Integral (Full Justice). Rooted in Afro-Brazilian ancestral knowledges, Justiça Integral moves beyond punitive ethics and embraces an ethics of care to create a transformative approach to justice. Finally, we explore pathways to making justice possible for the wretched of the earth.

ABSTRACT

Within the conceptual frame of relational economic sociology, inheritance disputes are a canonical form of relational mismatch. But the social patterning of relational mismatches, and their various ties to inequality, remain murky. In this paper, I examine all known inheritance disputes in Dallas from 1895–1945 within their social context to generate hypotheses about the relationship between inequality and mismatches more broadly. Inheritance disputes were usually resolved by increasing the spread of fortunes; in this sense, they moderated wealth inequality between individuals. But not everyone was equally able to make their preferred estate distribution a reality. Using a series of case studies, I argue that dispute resolutions tended to reify normative family structures and naturalize sharp, moralized distinctions between fuzzy social categories. The legal resolutions to this class of relational mismatches may marginally mitigate individual-level wealth inequality and simultaneously produce categorical inequalities by race, class, gender, sexuality, and family structure. I conclude with a set of hypotheses and questions for future studies.

ABSTRACT

Past studies have yielded important findings on the stratification and consequences of parenting, but it remains inconclusive how the stratification of parenting changes as children grow and how parenting at different developmental stages creates cumulative advantages for children. To examine these questions, this paper analyzes data from the 2010 to 2018 China Family Panel Study, drawing on a sample of N = 1129 children. It employs Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), linear regression, and the Regression-with-Residuals (RWR) method to investigate the patterns, determinants, and consequences of parenting in China. This research yields several novel and important findings. First, CFA results indicate the presence of a latent construct underlying all dimensions of parenting, suggesting a pattern of concerted cultivation. Second, after controlling for family finances and structural factors, parental education robustly predicts all dimensions of parenting, highlighting a pattern of cultural capital stratification. Third, the strength of educational stratification in parenting decreases with age, supporting an age-as-leveler perspective in understanding the stratification of parenting. Fourth, RWR analyses reveal that Chinese concerted cultivation in childhood and early adolescence generates cumulative—though declining—advantages in children's cognitive abilities. This paper extends cross-cultural perspectives on the cultural capital theory of parenting, introduces an age-as-leveler perspective on the stratification of parenting, and highlights the cumulative function of parenting in social reproduction.

ABSTRACT

The link between educational attainment and attitudes towards out-groups stands out as one of the most consistent statistical associations in the social and political sciences. However, a recent analysis of survey data from the United States finds that the relationship between higher education and out-group prejudice depends on the content of education. In this Research Note, we replicate that study's analysis of tertiary-level academic majors within a European context and extend it to include academic specializations below the tertiary level. Our analyses of European Social Survey (ESS) data, spanning 32 countries and over 120,000 respondents, reveal substantial variation in the association between field of study and anti-immigrant prejudice. Specifically, we find that individuals with degrees in arts, humanities, and social sciences express more positive views towards immigrants than those with degrees in other fields. A similar, though less pronounced, pattern emerges among individuals with lower levels of educational attainment. These findings challenge simplistic and politicized notions of the impact of higher education, offering a more nuanced understanding of educational attainment and its so-called “liberalizing effect.”

ABSTRACT

Although studying elites is a growing strand of scholarship in social sciences, the literature is mostly migration-blind. In this research note, we examine the role of household composition for immigrants' pathways to the elite of the household income distribution in Germany. Distinguishing between native-native, immigrant-native, and immigrant-immigrant households, we investigate the propensity of being in the income elite by household composition and whether education and self-employment, two major pathways into the income elite, differ by household composition. We hypothesize that immigrants in immigrant-native households benefit from their native partner's host-country resources and support. Using data from the German Microcensus from 2009 to 2019 covering around three million observations, we show that immigrant-native households have a higher propensity of belonging to the income elite compared to immigrant-immigrant households. Surprisingly, we find no differences between immigrant-native and native-native households. In addition, we demonstrate that the positive association between education, self-employment and elite membership is stronger for immigrant-native households compared to immigrant-immigrant households. Overall, our research note highlights the importance of the household context for immigrants' access to the income elite.

ABSTRACT

Whether students educated in different ability tracks in secondary education develop different levels of civic and democratic engagement is yet unclear. To explore this issue, we focus on how schools bring students of different tracks and family backgrounds together, and whether such between-school differences are associated with varying growth rates in civic and democratic engagement during secondary education. Using newly collected 4-year panel data starting at the very beginning of the Dutch tracked educational system, the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (DAPDV), we study developments in institutional trust, societal interest, voting intention, and political knowledge. Growth curve models show that much of the variation between tracks and between schools is rather stable, although track differences in institutional trust became more pronounced. Although schools that are more compositionally diverse vary from homogeneous schools, track differences are largely present already at the start of secondary education. Within-individual transition models show that students moving up to more advanced tracks do gain in political knowledge.

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to current debates on the ethics of critical scholarship in an era of authoritarian consolidation and institutional erosion. It introduces intellectual solidarity as an ethical stance and reflexive dislocation as a methodological practice that together offer a grounded response to the complicities and constraints of academic life today. Drawing on personal experiences of academic migration—from the Philippines and the United States to Germany and the Netherlands—it explores how authoritarian logics are embedded in institutions often assumed to offer refuge, including the university. These logics manifest through marketisation, surveillance governance, and epistemic austerity. Situated within critical traditions of engaged scholarship, this commentary argues that sustaining sociology's relevance requires more than reflexivity—it demands a commitment to epistemic humility, public accountability, and institutional courage. In calling for a renewed public vocation of the social sciences, it offers intellectual solidarity and reflexive dislocation as provisional tools for thinking, acting, and relating in times of systemic crisis.