Sociological Review最新文献

The growing popularity of Western secular mindfulness programs in recent decades has frequently been criticized by sociologists. Mindfulness in this line of argument is viewed as the quintessential neoliberal and capitalist technology of the self. However, this – quite justified – functionalist critique does not account for how mindfulness is increasingly being used to escape growth driven-based optimization pressure. We therefore show, on the basis of our extensive empirical field research, how mindfulness is negotiated as a response to contemporary crises and social change, how this phenomenon can be understood as a symptomatic, contemporary cultural phenomenon. From our ethnographic data from 121 hours of participant observation in mindfulness courses in Germany and six interviews with mindfulness teachers, as well as analysis of relevant literature, we reconstruct four paradoxes of mindfulness. With reference to this, we show to what extent mindfulness is a program of specious promises. For in the final analysis, the broad accessibility and popularity of the program are based on the fact that its application is just as paradoxical as the social problems to which it promises to be a solution.

This article explores the challenges faced by working-class environmentalism through the case study of the industrial decline of Porto Marghera’s petrochemical complex, in Venice, Italy. It argues that there is a class dimension in environmentalist struggles in both workplaces and communities. Workplace-centred struggles are conflicts over the conditions under which workers produce commodities or reproduce labour-power, while community-centred struggles are conflicts over the conditions of workers’ own reproduction. The distinction between workplace-centred and community-centred struggles is based on three theoretical expansions: (1) a conception of working-class based on dispossession rather than exploitation; (2) a conception of work including both production and reproduction; (3) a conception of working-class interests encompassing both the workplace and the community. The article thus contributes to environmental labour studies with an original analysis of the interplay between workplace-centred and community-centred working-class environmentalist struggles. In Porto Marghera, in the 1990s and 2000s, the community-centred and workplace-centred working-class environmentalist camps diverged over chlorine-based production, with the former demanding a just transition away from chlorine and the latter a just transition within it. While the rival mobilisations limited damage to health and the environment on the one hand, and to chlorine workers’ livelihoods on the other hand, chlorine-based production was closed without full environmental remediation and without the relocation of all its workers to comparable jobs. The article concludes that the convergence between workplace and community organising is a critical step in the construction of alternatives to the jobs versus environment dilemma.

With the rise of digital capitalism, a novel occupational segment has emerged: so-called ‘tech workers’. Members of this grouping render and encode the digital technologies that permeate contemporary social life. While there are many studies about highly precarious digital labourers, research on these digital professionals remains scarce. Based on 40 original interviews, the article explores the subjectivity of tech workers. Specifically, it asks whether understandings of middle-class employees as entrepreneurial selves with a holistic market orientation hold true for this grouping, or whether new cultures of subjectivation are emerging. The key finding from these interviews is that tech workers show contours of a post-neoliberal subjectivity. While the figure of the entrepreneurial self remains an alluring force, this study detected four transformative cultures of subjectivation: (1) a return of the critique of economic inequality; (2) a concern for diversity; (3) an ethic of mindfulness; and (4) a lifestyle that signals ordinariness. These distinct forms of subjectivity point to the formation of a new middle-class fraction. However, drawing on the sociology of critique, this article also considers how this transformation of subjectivity can be appropriated as yet another new spirit of capitalism.

Scholarship has identified women as the ideal neoliberal subjects of late capitalism and, it is argued, that increasingly intensified practices of appearance and visibility are critical to their new labouring subjectivities. However, there is also a small but growing body of research on the relationship between men, the body, and practices of appearance and looking. In this article, we examine the experiences of men (n = 12, ages 23–33 years) in the highly aestheticized industry of the performing arts, including theatre, dance, film and television. Drawing on feminist- and Foucauldian-informed approaches to creative and cultural industries, we gleaned two overarching themes from this research, including: the imperative to take up a particular bodily ideal and the complexities and uncertainties this entails; and the necessity to successfully emotionally manage these complexities and uncertainties. Together these two dimensions represented key performativities in the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject for men in the performing arts. We conclude with preliminary observations about men working in industry-specific contexts, such as the performing arts, and how the experiences of these men shed insight on practices of visibility and appearance of men more broadly.

How could queer activism for social change be possible in an authoritarian but neoliberal environment? What does neoliberalism imply for queer struggles in non-Western contexts where liberal democracy is absent or non-existent? This article introduces the concept of ‘quiet politics’ to establish a new theoretical lens for understanding queer organizing under global capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data on the rise of corporate diversity activism in Singapore, it analyzes how queer employees navigate the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in multinational corporations. The concept of quiet politics helps us understand the nuanced ways in which queer subjects ‘quietly’ mobilize themselves through a negotiation of neoliberalism, queer politics, and the authoritarian government that persecutes homosexuality. In doing so, this article challenges the Western notion of queer liberalism and sheds new light on the complex entanglement of neoliberal capitalism, corporate diversity, contentious politics, and queer activism from a global perspective.