Wiley: The British Journal of Sociology: Table of Contents
Caught Between Ideology and Self‐Interest: Subjective Social Status and Meritocratic Beliefs Shape Whether People Perceive, Feel Anger About, and Want to Change Economic Conflict
ABSTRACT
Belief in meritocracy and social status are central to understanding how people think and behave in relation to economic conflict. In this paper, we investigate how belief in meritocracy is moderated by (subjective) social status for three different aspects of citizens' attitudes towards economic inequality and conflict, namely (1) perceived conflict, (2) anger about economic inequality and (3) intentions to change economic conflict (egalitarianism). Data from the International Social Survey Programme on 29 countries reveal that the effect of meritocracy depends on social status and differs meaningfully across the three attitudes. For people high in social status, belief in meritocracy relates to lower perceptions of conflict, anger, and egalitarianism. For people with a low subjective social status there is no or a weak relation of belief in meritocracy with the outcomes. In addition, when belief in meritocracy was low, those with a high subjective social status appeared to be concerned about inequality as they perceived more economic conflict and felt more anger than those with a low subjective social status. However, this was not the case for intentions to reduce inequality. Hence, these effects of meritocracy and social status should be understood in light of self-interest concerns of social groups, rather than solely ideological domination.
Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. By Brendan Ballou, New York City: PublicAffairs, 2023. 368 pp. £16.99 (paperback). ISBN‐13: 9781541702110
The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.
The Double Erosion of Liberal Citizenship: Economization and Moralization
ABSTRACT
Contemporary liberal state citizenship is hollowed-out from two sides simultaneously. One is economization: it foregrounds the capacity to “contribute” and to be self-providing as criterion for naturalization, and it shows the imprint of neoliberalism as political-ordering and subject-forming principle. The other is moralization: it asks certain applicants for citizenship not just for observing the law but internalizing and identifying with its underlying values, and it occurs in a context of allegedly failing Muslim immigration, particularly in Western Europe. Both tendencies challenge foundational elements of liberal citizenship: the notion, central to social liberalism since John Stuart Mill, that society is non-contractual and a community of fate, with respect to economization; and the Kantian distinction between morality and legality, or between belief and conduct, with respect to moralization. I illustrate both trends with recent citizenship reforms in Western Europe, with a focus on Germany, Britain, France, and Switzerland.
Fairness Evaluations of Higher Education Graduates’ Earnings: The Role of Female Preference for Equality and Self‐Interest
ABSTRACT
Educational and occupational horizontal segregation contribute significantly to economic inequalities, especially in contexts with a strong correspondence between fields of study and occupational outputs, such as in Germany. However, the extent to which individuals perceive disparities in economic returns across different fields of study as fair and the factors influencing these fairness evaluations remain largely unexplored. This study aims to understand fairness evaluations by assessing two theoretical explanations and their interrelation: (1) female preference for equality, where women generally favour smaller earnings disparities, and (2) biases leading to higher reward expectations for individuals in the same field of study as the evaluator. Our empirical research draws on a novel survey experiment from the German Student Survey (2021), in which higher education students evaluated the fairness of realistic earnings for graduates from various fields of study. These earnings relate to the entry phase of an individual's career, reflecting differences in economic returns exclusively tied to fields of study, independent of occupational or life trajectories. Our findings support the female preference for equality and self-interest theoretical perspectives, revealing that women and respondents in fields associated with lower-earning jobs tend to perceive greater unfairness. We further find evidence of an interaction between the two mechanisms, with women being particularly likely to perceive greater unfairness when it aligns with their self-interest.
Reconstructing the Social Construction of Reality
ABSTRACT
What is the relationship between legitimation and institutionalization? We take a fresh look at a more complex and nuanced landscape than has previously been documented. Our approach is to view legitimation and institutionalization as separate, though related, processes. We engage in theory building to develop a typology suggesting four different ways in which the social construction of reality can be achieved: instantiating (mutual causal emergence, coming into being), realizing (legitimating toward institutionalization), aspiring (legitimating from institutionalization) and missing (mutual causal suppression, unrealized potential). Our typology contributes a new foundational framework for the sociology of knowledge for better explicating socially constructed reality, not only in periods of stability but also in the uncertainty of liquid times and states.
Trump and the Remaking of American Grand Strategy. The Shift From Open Door Globalism to Economic Nationalism. By B. van Apeldoorn, J. Veselinovič, and N. de Graaff, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 159 pp. Euro 42,79. ISBN: 978‐3‐031‐34691‐0
The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.
The Outsider Within. Anticolonial Critiques of Humanity and the Cosmopolitan Vision
ABSTRACT
This article re-examines the anticolonial critique of the concept of ‘humanity’. It uses the example of Leopold Senghor to show the extent to which this critique is shaped by their sociological marginality. Drawing on Georg Simmel's discussion of the ‘stranger’ and Patricia Hill Collins's discussion of the ‘outsider within’, the study rethinks the production of knowledge in racially structured societies. As ‘outsiders within’ colonial empires, anticolonial thinkers from the 1930s to the 1960s challenge the idea of a universal humanity used to justify colonialism and expose its racial stratification. Their critique helps to end colonial domination and develop a more robust conception of common humanity, aligned with a genuine cosmopolitanism that resists exploitative manipulation and promotes anti-racist agendas. By exploring the critical potential of the figure of the stranger or outsider within, this study invites sociologists to integrate diverse perspectives into sociological discourse and to promote a cosmopolitan epistemology that combines particular and universal insights.
Neighbourhood Effects Across Generations and the Reproduction of Inequality
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the enduring impact of neighbourhood deprivation on youth development, exploring multigenerational aspects often overlooked in existing research. I investigate how neighbourhood environments experienced across two generations impact youth outcomes, focussing on cognitive skills and socio-emotional behaviour. Using data from the 1958 National Child Development Study in the UK, this study employs a Regression with Residuals (RWR) design to comprehensively assess any long-lasting effects. The results point to an enduring impact of neighbourhood deprivation on both outcomes, revealing that sustained exposure to disadvantage drives persistently different developmental trajectories. I find evidence for a transmission mechanism, indicating that exposure to neighbourhood deprivation during parental own formative years affects their offspring's outcomes, directly and indirectly. While parental formative neighbourhood environments significantly shape cognitive development through mechanisms related to education and income, socio-emotional outcomes are also influenced by the legacy of neighbourhood context across generations. While conventional approaches focus on a single point in time, this study contributes to neighbourhood effects literature by taking a lengthier perspective and acknowledging the protracted and influential role that neighbourhoods as social institutions may play in shaping individual opportunities and inequality dynamics over time.
Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. By Calarco, J., Portfolio Penguin, 2024. 336 pp. £24.00 (hardback). ISBN: 9780593538128
The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.
A Du Boisian Sociological Imagination: The Black Radical Tradition, Marxism and Du Boisian Sociology
ABSTRACT
W. E. B. Du Bois is finally recognized as one of the founders of sociology, a social theorist, and a methodological innovator. The recognition of Du Bois' work is accompanied by the emergence of a contemporary Du Boisian sociology. This sociology takes inspiration from the work of Du Bois, but it does not limit itself to his work. It aims to bring into sociology the work of scholars that so far have been confined to the margins of the discipline, among them, Franz Fanon and Stuart Hall. Yet, as Du Bois work gets increasing visibility, important debates emerge. One of these debates concerns Du Bois' relation to Marxism, and the relationship between Du Boisian sociology to Marxist sociology. Marxist sociologists argue that Du Bois' late work, as well as the work of Franz Fanon and Stuart Hall, belongs in the Marxist tradition. In this essay I argue that while Du Bois, Fanon, and Hall were sympathetic to Marxism, their work cannot be encapsulated within the Marxist tradition. The question of the human was central to their thought. Moreover, for them colonialism and racism structure identity, lived experience and politics under capitalism in ways that are not reducible to class and class conflict. The Marxist appropriation of their work diminishes its originality and precludes the discipline from questioning the coloniality of its historical silences and its epistemic limits.
Class, gender and the work of working‐class women amid turbulent times
Abstract
The article focuses on the work of working-class women (WCW) amid turbulent times. Its timespan is just prior to and during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. The women's work, and the key skills involved, are fundamental to everyday lives, but both have been under-valued and under-rewarded. The pandemic shone a fresh light on the societal importance of this work and highlighted how its under-valuation and the women's systemic low pay and inferior working conditions have serious ramifications not only for individual workers and their families but for the provision of key services. The article centres WCW, at the intersection of classed and gendered disadvantage, to ask about inequalities in work experiences. Analysing nationally representative samples of thousands of workers in the UK prior to and as Covid-19 rolled out, we compare WCW with other workers. We show that the women faced both persistent and new inequalities at work: enduring low earnings, pandemic-led risks to jobs and paid hours, little opportunity to work from home or flexibly, and stressful key working roles. We reveal the heavily classed nature of some of these findings, show that others were more strongly gendered, while still others were classed and gendered outcomes that require intersectional analyses of the women's working lives.
Meritocratic beliefs in the United States, Finland, and China: A multidimensional approach using latent class analysis
Abstract
This study employs latent class analysis (LCA) as a novel methodology to investigate the multidimensional nature of meritocratic beliefs, addressing the limitations of traditional unidimensional approaches. Using data from the International Social Survey Program 2009 for the United States, Finland, and China, this study demonstrates several advantages of this multidimensional approach. First, LCA effectively identifies dual consciousness, where individuals simultaneously endorse meritocratic and structuralist explanations of social stratification. The analysis reveals three distinct narratives explaining social stratification: purely meritocratic beliefs, predominantly meritocratic beliefs, and dual consciousness. While all three subtypes consider merits highly important, they differ in their perceived importance of structural factors. Second, LCA facilitates cross-national comparisons, unveiling qualitative typological variations in meritocratic beliefs across countries. Unique country-specific subtypes or patterns emerge: Finland exhibits purely meritocratic beliefs, the United States shows predominantly meritocratic beliefs, and China demonstrates a dominance of dual consciousness. Although dual consciousness exists in all three countries, its prevalence varies significantly—dominant in China, moderate in the United States, and least in Finland. Third, this study reveals that the effect of education on meritocratic beliefs varies across the three countries. Education strengthens individual meritocratic beliefs in the United States, weakens them in Finland, and shows no significant effect in China. These findings highlight both within-country and across-country heterogeneity of meritocratic beliefs, underscoring the importance of a multidimensional approach.
Action‐based explanations as a basis for the analysis and design of the social world
Abstract
In sociology, the question of what it means to explain social phenomena and how this relates to the purpose of the social sciences is important but nowadays rarely asked. This article elaborates on this question and provides an answer by outlining the program of “explanatory sociology” as a branch of the modern social science approach. It is shown that, in this framework, to explain means to uncover cause-effect relationships based on models of individuals who are assumed the central force in social life. This idea is taken further to uncover specific challenges that individuals face in social life and how and why they establish and manage (or do not) social forms that help to organize the world from the viewpoint of their abilities and needs. Such action-oriented explanations have been presented and developed in sociology since its very beginning. Two main forms or logics to construct action-based explanations are outlined and developed due to the form and function of the used action theory or model. The article contributes to the discussion about the form and task of sociological theorizing by presenting action-based explanations as a form of sociological theorizing that defines a clear task in exploring challenges in social life and assessing possible forms of coping with them from the perspective of individuals. By doing so, two main ways of broadening explanations are considered and compared in light of what the purpose of sociology might be.
A conceptual refinement of ritual: The case of guanxi
Abstract
Informal affective bonding through which social resources are deployed, known as guanxi, is significant in social, political, and economic relationships in present-day China. Guanxi is sociologically understood as a form of social network and also as a type of social exchange. In addition, guanxi is regarded as a kind of or derived from ritual practices. Ritual aspects of guanxi are critically examined. The concept of ritual is distinguished from Confucian li, with which guanxi is often associated. Rituals held to be supportive of guanxi are examined, three distinct conceptualisations of ritual are identified, and ritual is differentiated from social practice, ceremony, and rite. Finally, emotions in guanxi ritual are briefly discussed, comparing Collins' approach with an account from the early Chinese theorist Xunzi.
The concept that went viral: Using machine learning to discover charisma in the wild
Abstract
The term “charisma” is recognized as sociology's most successful export to common speech. While sociologists habitually dismiss popular uses of the word, we address its vernacularity head on as a worthy object of study and as a potential resource for conceptual development. Using machine learning, we locate “charisma” within the wider discursive field out of which it arises (and continues to arise) across four corpora; namely: Weber’s major writings; social scientific research (123,531 JSTOR articles); and social media (“X”) posts containing of “charisma” (n=77,161) and its 2023 variant, “rizz” (n=85,869). By capturing meaning structures that discursively suspend “charisma” across multiple dimensions, we discern three spectra that help to distinguish charisma’s sociological and non-sociological uses. Spectrum one differentiates perspectives which see charisma as having either a structural or individual-level range of efficacy. Spectrum two differentiates indifferent/analytical perspectives on charisma from perspectives which see it as desirable but also morally conservative. Spectrum three differentiates between relational and individualized ontologies for charisma. We find that, rather than hewing closely to the Weberian formulation, social scientific uses exist in an intermediate position vis-à-vis these three spectra. Thus, scholars participate in what they otherwise criticize as charisma’s vulgarization. The article concludes with recommendations for how to constructively interact with ‘popular charisma.’
Racial discrimination in helping situations depends on the cost of help: A large field experiment in the streets of Paris
Abstract
Decades of field experiments show that White Americans are more likely to discriminate against Black Americans when the situation provides a nonracist rationalization for withholding help from a Black target - for instance, when the cost of helping looks unreasonable. However, work on racial discrimination in helping is scarcer outside of the US context. The present experiment extends this line of research to Europe and studies differences in helping asiatique (Asian), blanc (White) and noir (Black) men and women in France. In addition, it assesses to what extent racial discrimination in the probability to provide assistance is moderated by the perceived cost of help. The study rests on a sample of over 4500 independent observations collected through a factorial design that combines 12 testers (equally apportioned in race and gender groups), two social class conditions and four observation sites. Testers asked for directions to pedestrians in front of the traffic lights of a busy road, and pedestrians could provide different forms of help that varied in perceived cost. The analysis indicates that overall asiatique and noir testers receive help less often than their blanc counterparts. It also shows that racial discrimination is stronger when the perceived cost of helping is higher.
The gender gap in fair earnings increases with age due to higher age premium for men
Abstract
This study explores how gender and age interact in shaping beliefs about fair pay through a factorial survey experiment conducted with German employees. Respondents evaluated hypothetical worker descriptions varying in age, gender, and earnings. While no gender gap in fair earnings was found for the youngest hypothetical workers, a significant gap favoring men emerged with increasing age. This suggests that male workers receive a higher age premium on fair earnings than female workers. The findings highlight the need to understand how gender interacts with other characteristics to legitimize workplace inequalities.
The unclaimed: Abandonment and hope in the city of angels. By P. Prickett and S. Timmermans, London: Penguin Random House. 2024
The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 1, Page 195-196, January 2025.
Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquillity, and Ecocide. By Gregory Salle, Cambridge: Polity Press. 2024, pp. 122. ISBN: 987‐1‐5095‐5995‐4
The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 1, Page 193-194, January 2025.
Seeking western men: Mail‐order brides under China’s global rise. By Monica Liu, Stanford University Press. 2022
The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 1, Page 188-189, January 2025.
British Journal of Sociology
British Journal of Sociology is published on behalf of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is unique in the United Kingdom in its concentration on teaching and research across the full range of the social, political and economic sciences. Founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the LSE is one of the largest colleges within the University of London and has an outstanding reputation for academic excellence nationally and internationally.
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• To lead debate on key methodological and theoretical questions and controversies in contemporary sociology, for example through the annual lecture special issue
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