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.

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

This paper investigates the causal effect of motherhood on women's occupational class trajectories—the Motherhood Class Penalty—using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We apply sequence optimal matching alongside other matching techniques to construct counterfactual class trajectories for mothers in the UK. Our results show that motherhood significantly increases downward mobility and limits access to professional occupations. Low professional women face an estimated 15% penalty, while high professional women experience a 5% penalty compared to their childless counterparts. We find that professional-class women are more likely to remain attached to the labour market after childbirth, whereas working-class mothers are at greater risk of permanently exiting the workforce. Among all groups, low professional women experience the most significant forgone upward mobility, highlighting how motherhood penalties vary across the class spectrum. These findings stress the substantial human capital loss associated with motherhood in the UK and suggest that occupational penalties are shaped by existing socio-economic hierarchies, potentially reinforcing broader patterns of inequality.

ABSTRACT

Scholars of aging and nationalism rarely engage with each another. To remedy this gap, I examine how ethnonationalism becomes a resource for navigating the precarity of aging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two private senior residences in a region of Québec, I show how financially privileged Québécois seniors enact nationhood through everyday cultural practices. I introduce the concept of “aging in nationhood” to describe how seniors draw on ethnonationalist identities to foster comfort, community, and meaning at an age of decline—often with exclusionary effects. Seniors who do not—or cannot—assimilate into majority culture experience social isolation. By linking nationalism and aging, I show how seniors reproduce the nation, shaping their well-being and the boundaries of belonging. While grounded in Québec, this concept offers new insight for thinking about how dominant-group seniors mobilize ethnonationalism as a source of membership and exclusion in white aging societies across the Atlantic.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Scholars of the welfare state have long argued that, in liberal democracies, welfare state expansion depends on successful coalitions in its favour. Under what circumstances do these coalitions form? Party systems, economic interest, and political mobilisation have all been thought to influence the emergence of coalitions for welfare state expansion. In this article, I argue that law plays a critical role in facilitating the last of these factors. Drawing on a growing body of literature that sees law as constitutive of, rather than merely reflective of, social relations, I demonstrate that available legal forms meaningfully inform opportunities for welfare coalitions. In particular, I examine how debates over what a trade union is—a voluntary association of individuals, or a corporate body deserving of a state statute—shaped coalitions for welfare reform in the US and the UK at the turn of the twentieth century.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Tracing the early adoption of computer gang databases by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s to the deployment of computationally-assisted surveillance during the Vietnam War, this paper uses a genealogical approach to compare surveillance technologies developed across the arc of colonial racial capitalism—from the Age of Imperialism through the Cold War and into the historical present. Specifically analyzing technologies displayed at the 1902-03 Hanoi Exposition in French Indochina and the 1964-65 New York World's Fair during the Cold War, it positions Southeast Asia is an important case because much of the primary architecture for the development of the modern American surveillance state historically arose from attempts to manage anti-imperial resistance across the decolonizing Pacific. The analysis connects how early anthropometric measurement and recordkeeping practices under French colonial rule transformed through the widespread adoption of computational tools for postwar technocratic planning during the American War in Vietnam, demonstrating a rationalization of surveillance over time as economies of accumulation and disposal interacted with technological innovations in bureaucratic management to maximize means-end, state-market efficiencies. Ultimately the analysis offers the concept of the coloniality of data, showing how global interpellations of the locatable criminal body in local, national, and international databases continue to constitute data itself as a rationalized—and increasingly automated—technology of imperial power.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Family financial assistance with home ownership has attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, the role of culture and ethnicity, transnational ties, and migration in this practice remains significantly under-addressed. By drawing on interviews conducted with donors and recipients of family financial assistance with home ownership in Australia who had personal and recent family experiences of migration, this article begins to address this topic. The findings show that participants from migrant backgrounds often evoke culture and ethnicity while discussing family cultures of transmission and cultural preferences for owner occupied housing, and that they use culture as a means of deflecting potentially uncomfortable questions about fairness and equity. The findings also suggest that family financial assistance can be considered to facilitate a final stage of migrant settling which may take place years after the migrant arrives in Australia. Finally, the findings show that transnational families remain highly interconnected both emotionally and financially, and may provide financial assistance with home ownership as part of family wealth strategies through which transnational families pool resources for collective advantage. Drawing on these findings, the article shows that migration plays a crucial, and underappreciated, role in the provision and receipt of family financial assistance with home ownership. It ultimately argues that popular conversations and academic studies in the multicultural societies in which debates about the asset economy are most active (the US, the UK, Australia) have been dominated by Anglo-centric experiences, and have not considered how these arrangements may extend beyond national borders, and invites scholars in this area to more fully consider the role of migration in research on families and wealth.

ABSTRACT

Romantic repartnering in later life has received substantial scholarly and public attention in light of population aging and changes in family dynamics. In the United States, the importance of household wealth as a means to support basic welfare needs means that questions of dating and repartnering are complicated by financial considerations. This is particularly true with regard to preserving family wealth for children and grandchildren. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups with 68 adults aged 55 to 92 in Phoenix, Arizona, we explore older adults' concerns about wealth in their decisions to date and repartner. Respondents describe desires to protect wealth for future generations and to evade financial tensions in intergenerational relationships. In this context, many respondents see new romantic partnerships as a potential threat to their control over family wealth. Faced with these concerns, older adults adopt relationship strategies designed to maintain some informality in their relationships—living apart together and no government marriage—which they believe will help them avoid the financial repercussions of repartnering. These findings highlight how older adults balance family concerns and plans about financial transfers with desires to date and repartner in later life. While previous research highlights the ways that marriage shapes wealth accumulation over the life-course, these findings suggest the opposite may also be true. For older adults seeking to repartner, a lifetime of accumulated assets—and the desire to transmit these to kin—may shape the types of romantic relationships they pursue, and in particular, may lead to avoiding formalizing new relationships through marriage.

ABSTRACT

Prior literature on gender and wealth accumulation largely examines the role of families in reproducing inequalities. However, less attention has been paid to families without sons, a significant demographic, particularly within China's one-child generation, that challenges conventional understandings of familial wealth dynamics. This study addresses this gap by proposing a new conceptual framework: families as sequential and interconnected sites and agents of wealth accumulation across the life course. It specifically applies this framework to investigate the experiences of siblingless daughters from China's one-child generation. Drawing upon 82 individual interviews, this research argues that families are dynamic and sequentially unfolding sites of wealth transfers, acting as both enablers and limiters of women's wealth accumulation. This perspective reveals how family structures, resources, and roles transform and interact at various life-course stages. The findings demonstrate that siblingless daughters are significant recipients of wealth transfers—including cash, valuables, and property—from multiple givers across key life-course stages such as university education, career entry, and marriage and childbirth. While wealth transfers within natal families are often relatively uncontested, access to marital wealth remains highly contingent on women's adherence to patriarchal expectations, particularly childbearing and the production of male heirs. By highlighting a life-course lens and the evolving, relational nature of family-based wealth transfers, this study exposes consistent yet competing relationships and power dynamics. It reveals instances of merit-based opportunity within these dynamics, alongside the reinforcement of enduring patriarchal constraints. This new conceptualisation not only allows for a deeper examination of persistent patriarchal constraints as they evolve and accumulate across life-course points, but also exposes niche spaces where some women negotiate and potentially subvert these constraints to accumulate wealth. Therefore, this study advances research on gender and wealth by illuminating the complex interplay of familial relationships, resources, and roles across the sequential life course.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on 78 interviews and 12 focus groups, this study shows that science-fiction shapes the US public's understandings about economic consequences from AI, informing widespread concerns that sentient machines might fully replace human workers. Though popular beliefs are frequently dismissed as unimportant or merely ignorant, I find that these “science-fictional expectations” about AI's potential to out-compete humans also enable creative departures from the prevailing moral economy of normative judgments about market fairness. By imagining the possibility of AI becoming a rival group-actor in the labor market, participants subverted deeply entrenched, neoliberal cultural associations between moral deservingness and economic performance in two ways. Respondents who anticipated “labor substitution” feared that AI's superior efficiency would render humanity worthless, thereby reinterpreting the moral legitimacy of economic productivity as an existential danger. Others refuted this threat by “enchanting” humanity with enigmatic capabilities said to be unattainable by machines and more valuable than productive capacity. Whereas prior work has focused on deliberate efforts by political actors to influence popular judgments about the economy, these findings show that the public itself can creatively contribute to change in the moral economy through its unexpected, wide-ranging, and even science-fictional interpretations of social conditions like AI automation.

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

With reference to Simmel's work, this article puts forward the notion of ‘stranger views’, which are expressive on the one hand, of the experiences of those who occupy a marginal position in society characterised by experiences of belonging and non-belonging, and on the other, of our own position as researchers, probing spaces of non-belonging and hearing stories that are then rearticulated for an academic audience. In doing so, it provides a reflective dialog between the findings of a research project on migrant homelessness in the UK and the methodological framework brought by New Area Studies. The article deploys the life story research method and focuses on views of the UK from the perspective of migrants from former European colonies who have been in the UK for several years but whose immigration status and lack of economic capital renders them vulnerable to destitution and homelessness. The article offers unique insights into the co-existence of belonging and non-belonging and the dissonance between these feelings. In providing a dialog between accounts deriving from life story interviews with migrants experiencing homelessness and a self-critical reflection about the knowledge produced with such accounts, our article contributes to debates on the sociology of marginality with a three-tiered discussion of migration, homelessness and methodological frameworks, which are rarely considered together.