The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

This article explores why individuals in China undertake numerous tasks for souls and spirits whether or not they believe that these beings exist. We shift away from Eurocentric approaches to studying religion which have been centered around conceptualizing belief as cognitive assent to a theological or cosmological statement. Instead, we outline a multiplex structure of beliefs sustaining religious and spiritual action. Using the case of the Hungry Ghost festival, which approximately 378 million people in mainland China engage in annually, we present field observations of a village in China as well as 59 interviews with its residents. Participants offer items to the souls of their deceased parents and grandparents, along with non-family spirits, propelled by four types of beliefs: acceptance of cosmological postulates on existence, relational commitments to certain family ties, experiential knowledge derived from personal encounters, and the expectation that particular actions are instrumental in bringing about a desired end. Participants weave their own multiplex structures of belief as composites of habits and knowledge validated by experience. When the ontology of a spiritual practice acknowledges the social reality of the family line as much as the material actuality of a corpse, family members can behave toward the deceased as social entities without endorsing the existence of spirits and souls. Our findings situate spiritual activities in their relational settings and hold insights for why people engage in their practices of spirituality in China.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Supporters of a recently announced normative turn in sociology acknowledge that what they recommend is by no means entirely new. However, they have given little attention to an early precursor: the British sociologist Leonard Hobhouse. He focussed on the role of the normative in social life and insisted that sociology could, and must, play an active role in realising progressive values. Furthermore, like some more recent advocates of normative sociology, he insisted on the key role that philosophy plays in grounding the values underpinning it. In fact, he developed an elaborate philosophical system, one which illustrates the challenging requirements that any normative sociology must satisfy, and the problems it faces in doing this. I argue that, despite the encyclopaedic knowledge and extraordinary ingenuity displayed in Hobhouse’s work, he fails to provide a sound basis for a normative sociology and that his work raises questions about the likely success of any such project.

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and judicial wiretap analysis in Argentina, this paper shows that collusion between state actors and violent non-state actors operates through fluid and competitive relational networks rather than stable hierarchies or fixed institutional arrangements. In Mexico, private security entrepreneurs broker ties between public officials, clients, and violent specialists, particularly during periods of electoral competition. In Argentina, criminal organizations and state agents develop shifting alliances that shape drug market regulation and patterns of violence. Across both cases, collusion depends on the continuous negotiation of trust, access, and information across overlapping networks embedded within state institutions. We argue that these patterns cannot be fully explained by frameworks that treat collusion as a legacy of authoritarianism or as a product of institutional weakness. Instead, collusion emerges as an adaptive relational process shaped by competition among actors and the instability of contemporary security governance. These dynamics produce fluid and contested “gray zones” in which legality and illegality are continuously reconfigured, with direct implications for how violence and authority are organized in Latin America.

ABSTRACT

Despite rising socioeconomic inequalities most people see individualised merit as crucial for social success. Drawing on surveys such as the ISSP a wealth of research examines trends in subjective perceptions, the relative importance accorded to merit and non-merit factors for getting ahead in life and factors which influence lay perceptions. However, varied conclusions emerge from the literature. Further, puzzles ensue from the measurement of lay perceptions of (non-)merit factors as drivers of social success. Drawing on new qualitative data I argue that the specific, individualised, and binary framings of merit and non-merit beliefs in conventional accounts under-explore the varied ways in which people recognise structural processes. I also argue that explanation is hampered by over-stating lay misapprehensions, or what people don't see, when a greater focus on what people do see, and what they believe to have mattered in their biographical lived experience, would support a more nuanced sociological analysis of situatedness and complexity in lay apprehensions of social inequality.

ABSTRACT

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy developed the notion of “classification situations” to describe how ordinal schema that sort and rank individuals, like credit scores, are used to differentiate opportunities, prices, and services in ways that structure life chances while masking inequality as meritocratic. We argue that contemporary criminal records increasingly function as such classificatory tools. The proliferation of alternatives to traditional case processing and record-relief policies challenge the widely-held view of criminal records as binary markers of exclusion by revealing a system that is increasingly gradational, dynamic, and responsive to intervention. Drawing on examples from criminal law, policy, and the private market, we show how opportunities to mitigate or remediate criminal record marks are structured to reward those with greater social and material resources. We then test our theory using linked, individual-level administrative criminal record, education, and unemployment insurance wage data. Our findings illustrate how the severity of a criminal record is not necessarily based on factual guilt or culpability but rooted in social advantage.

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the production of ‘fraud’ at the interface between welfare and migration regimes. Taking the welfare micropublic of children's social care in the UK as a case study, we focus on encounters between migrant families subject to the ‘no recourse to public funds’ immigration condition and London local authorities. Through analysis of policy documents and ethnographic data, we trace the counter-fraud turn within the local state in the 2010s. We argue that a shift away from ‘the child in need’ and towards destitution as the threshold for support saw children's rights legislation reinterpreted through the lens of ‘fraud’, implicitly racialising impoverished migrant children as undeserving of essential support. Paying close attention to questions of undeservingness, defined in part through attributions of fraud, we highlight the ways in which migrant parents are subject to suspicion by social services. We suggest that existing literature on the ‘problem’ of welfare fraud helps us to contextualise this shift but does not yet sufficiently address the production of fraud at the welfare-migration nexus. Drawing on more contemporary ethnographic material, we show how the counter-fraud turn has been deepened and expanded. We argue that extensive counter-fraud practices have been developed through processes of discretion at the local level, producing and normalising major shifts in the enactment of policy that remain relatively hidden in the absence of more contextualised ethnographic research. Migrant families have thus been rendered ever-suspicious, either gatekept from essential support due to their ‘fraudulence’ or subject to ongoing monitoring if they receive support, caught up in the impossible labour of disproving their own ‘fraudulence’. Finally, we show that counter-fraud approaches arise from the interface between welfare and migration regimes in ways that bolster the logics of both immigration controls and welfare retrenchment, whilst amplifying the reach of the counter-fraud turn.

ABSTRACT

Tech facilitated intimate partner violence is increasingly embedded in everyday Ugandan digital life, including phone confiscation, SIM card control, WhatsApp monitoring, coerced “proof,” mobile money coercion, and reputational threats. This article examines digital coercive control as household governance and analyses how survivors and frontline supporters produce evidence under threat, focusing on the practical work of assembling “evidence packages” that may include screenshots, voice notes, timelines, and witnesses. Drawing on comparative qualitative research across an informal settlement in Kampala, a regional town, and a rural district with strong kin governance, the analysis shows how digital control reorganizes access to communication and money, how evidence making is shaped by safety calculations and stigma, and how institutions unevenly validate or dismiss digital traces. The article contributes to the sociology of intimate partner violence by showing that evidentiary credibility is socially distributed: the same digital trace may be read as proof, gossip, provocation, shame, or insufficient evidence depending on the survivor's social position, available intermediaries, and institutional venue. The article advances a low-resource approach to safer evidence intake across policing, health care, and community mediation, emphasizing patterned coercive control and survivor safety.

ABSTRACT

Scholars have long investigated intergenerational inequality, with attention to the associations among social origins, education, and socio-economic destinations: the so-called OED triangle. Meanwhile, recent research highlights distinct roles of education and skills in status attainment. Extending these studies, this article proposes a new framework—the OESD quadrangle—that incorporates origin, education, skills, and destination to better understand the structure of intergenerational inequality and its cross-national patterns. As an application, causal mediation analysis based on the counterfactual framework is performed using data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) for 27,812 individuals in 23 countries, encompassing parental status, respondents' educational attainment, adult cognitive skills, and occupational outcomes. The findings corroborate prior research, demonstrating that education significantly mediates the origin-destination association in all cases. Importantly, adult skills also exert a mediating power net of education, ranging from 4% (Sweden) to 25% (USA) of the total origin effect estimates in conservative models. These results suggest that fostering cognitive skills among the disadvantaged may help mitigate intergenerational inequality, although its magnitude varies across societies. By linking these cross-national differences to fundamental concepts such as meritocracy and credentialism, the study concludes with a preliminary typology of societies from a comparative perspective.

ABSTRACT

This article connects cultural taste to capitalist mechanisms of redistribution through the concept of political economy of taste. Building on Bourdieusian scholarship on recognition struggles and drawing on Mike Savage and Nancy Fraser, it examines how public performances of taste reshape representations of working-class culture and how these representations are mobilised by both far-right and centre-left elites to advance policies that redistribute economic resources upwards. The article develops the concept through two case studies: far-right politics and touristification. Combining theoretical discussion of existing literature and new empirical analyses of Giorgia Meloni's taste performances and touristification in Naples (Italy), it shows how positive recognition of working-class culture, framed as ‘authentic’ by political elites, opens new possibilities for capitalist accumulation, thus widening economic inequalities. The article argues that Bourdieusian taste studies have overlooked these dynamics because of their focus on the stratification of tastes, rather than on how taste can transform mechanisms of exploitation and expropriation. The article thus proposes a different epistemic orientation: towards taste as a political weapon reshaping national political economies.

ABSTRACT

The field of the sociogenomics of inequalities would benefit from discussing what its findings and ambitions mean for core theories of social stratification and mobility. Do sociologists need to reconsider their critique to structural-functionalist theory of stratification, and its neo-classical economic allies, that emphasise efficient sorting of individuals to social positions? Or do their interpretations of genetic correlates of inequality need to include reference to constructivist processes that have defined the genetic mix that has come to be rewarded in a society? I argue that, with the current sociogenomics methods, it is hard to disentangle these theories, which are however fundamentally different regarding the nature and structure of social stratification. Using simulations that distinguish context-dependent from context-independent genetic variability, it is shown that the field always needs to make untestable assumptions about the nature of genetic differences.

ABSTRACT

Today, the tools through which insurance operates are being imagined in new ways and shaped by broad societal processes including digitalisation, datafication, financialisation, and the growing prominence of socio-ecological risks. The ongoing transformations do not simply extend established insurantial practices; they potentially reconfigure the ways in which they work. The boundaries between public and private responsibility, collective pooling and individualisation, prevention and compensation are being renegotiated. In this introduction to the special issue, we discuss the role of social theory in recent sociological research dealing with these challenges. What makes insurance a particularly interesting research topic for sociologists is that while it is a core infrastructure of modern society, it is also intrinsically ripe with social theorisation. Insurance institutions' practical operations depend on particular ways of thinking about individuals and social collectives, organising them into pools, assessing their risks and future potential, and profiting from this activity. Importantly, theories of action and society are built into the insurance tool itself that operationalises notions such as trust, responsibility, fairness and solidarity.

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

Insurance serves as a social good, providing financial protection against disasters whilst operating within a profit-driven market. This dual role highlights the complex intersection of social and commercial interests, raising a fairness puzzle often portrayed as a trade-off between solidarity and actuarial fairness. Insurance organisations adhere to actuarial fairness by setting insurance premiums proportional to each individual's risk. As extreme weather drives greater losses in high-risk areas, actuarial fairness often results in unaffordable premiums for many. To address this, societies may adopt principles of solidarity fairness to subsidise their premiums. However, this approach threats diminishing personal responsibility to contain risk, as individuals may rely on subsidised protection rather than taking proactive measures. This study draws on a longitudinal qualitative study of a government-legislated insurance organisation to develop a process framework that reconceptualises fairness in insurance as a duality of solidarity and actuarial fairness. It offers insights into designing insurance systems that are socially equitable and financially sustainable.

No abstract is available for this article.

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.

ABSTRACT

Over the past 20 years, the insurance industry has been experimenting with technological innovations that deeply affect its business model and social function. This article explores the use of digital technologies to monitor policyholders' behaviour and personalise their insurance coverage. Information extracted from behavioural data can be used to produce individualised predictions and design proactive insurance policies, which aim to prompt policyholders to act on the possibility of future damages before they happen. This innovation could bring many benefits in terms of efficiency (improving loss ratio) and foresight (improving risk assessment), but also a renewed focus on individual responsibility for losses. As a consequence, we argue, the collective management of future uncertainty could be undermined, jeopardising the insurance solidarity that makes mutual protection viable.

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests that catastrophe insurance schemes should be considered within the framework of public goods and commons, and as a form of polycentric organization whose success depends on collective action. The first section situates catastrophe insurance within the “state withdrawal hypothesis:” while neoliberalism is usually understood as promoting a shift from social and solidary insurance programs to private, market-oriented ones, this does not apply to catastrophe insurance. The second section shows that one of the reasons for the persistence of public intervention in catastrophe insurance is its public good dimension: market best practice would indeed promote risk-based premiums leading to unaffordability issues and the disappearance of the good. Such insurance gaps are perceived as a “public bad.” Catastrophe insurance is thus a hybrid public good: it benefits from a large number of users and is threatened by their exclusion. The final section highlights the polycentricity of insurance systems and the challenge this poses to collective action for the sake of prevention.

ABSTRACT

Trust is both a prerequisite and a product of insurance, as insurance contracts are built on and create trust relations that enable a risk-averse perspective towards the future. At the same time, insurer-policyholder relationships are characterised by a persistent distrust, rooted in insurance economics and industry reputation. In this article, we discuss these dynamics through a Luhmannian understanding of (dis)trust as a complexity-reducing functional fiction resulting from social action. Beyond traditional insurance, we examine how trust relations are reconfigured by the introduction of digital technologies and data, developments that could enable new ways to calculate, price and manage risks. We critically assess the claim that these techniques make the future knowable and mitigate—or even eliminate—‘the unreliable human factor’, ultimately replacing trust relations with a principle of transparency. Drawing on sociology of insurance, critical data studies, and our own case-based research on digital insurance products marketed to individuals, we argue that these technologies do not eliminate uncertainties and vulnerabilities as expected in insurance discourse. Instead, they introduce new insecurities and complexities by increasing the trust relations required for insurance arrangements. Consequently, the principle of transparency offers a narrow, techno-solutionist substitute for trust, ignoring the affective aspects of insurer-policyholder relationships and potentially undermining the social contract and solidarity associated with insurance.