British Journal of Sociology最新文献

How do wealthy individuals use offshore financial structures like shell companies to protect personal assets? And how is such offshore wealth structuring itself variably organized? Moving beyond conceptualizations of offshore as concerning only individual tax havens, this article investigates offshore wealth structuring as a fundamentally relational practice to supply the first systematic image of the patterns between two key layers of offshore structures within a specific asset class. We analyze the overseas entities that hold expensive residential properties in the UK to make three contributions to debates around offshore. First, we identify a specific regional offshore circuit in its flows and magnitude by isolating two key layers, namely the entry layer, which is used to connect into the UK property market, and the action layer, which is used for the actual or projected appearance of managing the offshore structure. We next examine the interstices between these layers to reveal three patterns of offshore formations. These we term global funnel, selective gateway, and self-stacker, and we discuss their implications. Finally, we offer indirect evidence of which jurisdictions people are more likely to choose for "brass plate" incorporation and which they employ for more complicated structuring, either in actuality or in appearance, which has implications for policymaking. By identifying significant variation in the interstitial patterns between jurisdictions, we not only pinpoint which jurisdictions are used in relation to others and to what extent, but also provide indirect evidence of how they are used differently and discuss why. Our findings supply a pioneering analysis of the scope, scale, and interstitial formations of the offshore structures that wealthy individuals use to hold personal property.

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.

In this article, I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Kabul to argue that threat production should be understood as a mechanism of racial capitalism. Based on 15 months of fieldwork, including confidential security reports, observations of segregation systems, and Afghan media accounts, the analysis shows how private security companies in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan profited from the racialized presumption of Afghan dangerousness. Through numerical rating systems, selective knowledge production, and curated media summaries, Afghans were depicted as inherently threatening. These representations were reinforced by segregation regimes that divided the city into "foreigner" and Afghan zones, alongside wage hierarchies that paid Afghan guards a fraction of their Western counterparts for identical labour. The construction of Afghans as perpetual threats generated continuous demand for security services, allowing private companies to profit by selling protection from dangers they themselves (re)produced. I suggest that this process demonstrates how racial capitalism adapts in conflict zones, creating new markets not through resource extraction or land seizure but through the continual manufacture of racialized insecurity. While grounded in Kabul, the analysis contributes to broader debates on empire, capitalism, and security by highlighting how the commodification of racialized danger is increasingly central to the global security economy.

While most research on the radical right attempts to identify the one central voting motive among its supporters, few studies have sought to differentiate between different types of voters. Given this research gap, we assume that there are multiple paths to the radical right and that different groups have different motives for their support for this party family. Based on different waves of the ESS, we conduct a cluster analysis in order to classify the ideological heterogeneity within the electorates of 15 Western European radical right parties across three conflict dimensions (redistribution, cultural liberalism, migration). We distinguish between four types of voters, analyse their social characteristics and try to identify different voting motives, ranging from defending economic status hierarchies to processing economic insecurities or protesting the loss of cultural hegemony. On the basis of these findings, we discuss what holds the electoral coalition of the radical right together and what can potentially divide it.

Scholars have demonstrated how (neo)colonialism has produced durable North-South hierarchies in knowledge production about crime and punishment. Yet, most of these studies emphasize the epistemic "weight of empire" in ways that obscure the relational dynamics under which local bureaucrats domesticate imperial policy experiments at the margins of postcolonial cities. By taking the case of the Tactical System of Crime Analysis (STAD) in Santiago, Chile, this article explores how and why police officers and data analysts respond to "colonial situations" behind predictive policing as they navigate its underlying "broken windows" philosophy demanded by bank lenders and reinforced by US advisors. Drawing upon ethnographic observations within a Comisaria in Santiago, I argue that police officers and professionals negotiate the (neo)colonial conditions of policing through ambivalent morality -a set of hybrid discourses concerning individual choices that allows officers to inflict the criminal stigma upon the poor and assign responsibility for crime. Officers and data analysts interpret US "broken windows" philosophy through fragmented scripts and counterscripts that both reinforce and decenter poverty and personal choices as the primary sources of crime. Drawing upon these narratives, these agents define who is a criminal, what crimes deserve to be suppressed, and under what conditions somebody could legitimately break the law. This study not only shows how police officers and professionals redefine policing in moral terms but also illustrates the simultaneous attraction to and denial of neocolonial power while disclosing the symbolic mechanisms (i.e., scripts and counterscripts) under which this hybridity disrupts a simplistic replication of US "broken windows" discourse at the margins of Santiago.

As academic and activist spaces move online, queer, Dalit and feminist voices increasingly face repression through targeted digital attacks. Such attacks are not just limited to social media comments but have also affected real-time meetings on conferencing platforms. In this commentary, I reflect on one such incident of Dalit trans autobiography discussion session, which was disrupted through pornographic videos and obscene threats. These incidents occur within a political environment where the Indian state advertises itself to be queer-inclusive on a global stage, while continuing to stifle dissenting voices domestically. Right-wing actors increasingly frame feminist, queer or anti-caste movements as anti-national, leading to intensified surveillance, harassment and erasure. I situate this instance within broader patterns of ideological violence and homonationalist disciplining through a narration of other targeted attacks in different institutional settings. Drawing on Puar's concept of homonationalism and recent work on digital harassment, I argue that such disruptions do not function as isolated trolling but rather deliberative acts that oppose political forms of queerness demanding rights and accountability from the state. They tend to reinforce casteist, heteronormative and nationalist boundaries of inclusion. These attacks reveal how conferencing platforms reproduce precarity for marginalised voices. The commentary calls for a reframing of digital safety not as a technical or individual task, but as a collective, political responsibility shaped by platform design, institutional complicity, and ideological violence.

Like adults, children also provide care. This article explores the emotional labour of young carers who care for ill or disabled family members in China, a context where children's caregiving remains largely invisible in both policy and scholarship. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 30 young carer families in both urban and rural China, this study investigates how children manage, suppress, and perform emotions to sustain family life in the absence of formal welfare support. Building on Hochschild's (2012) concept of emotional labour, the analysis reveals how culturally embedded scripts, such as filial piety, operate as 'feeling rules' that legitimise and normalise children's affective contributions. Findings demonstrate the ambivalent nature of children's informal caregiving: while caregiving can foster pride, maturity, and recognition, it also generates exhaustion, guilt, and role confusion, extending beyond conventional notions of parentification. Situating these dynamics within the political economy of care, the study shows how children's emotional labour operates as an unacknowledged subsidy to social reproduction, masking structural inequalities and welfare retrenchment. By recognising children as consequential emotional actors, the article reconceptualises care as both a moral practice and a site of inequality, advancing young carers scholarship beyond Global North contexts.

This study employed ideas from narrative sociology to investigate how 31 Norwegian Muslims make meaning of ascriptions by mainstream society. Previous research has addressed the causes and consequences of Muslims' racialisation. However, little attention has been paid to how Muslims derive understanding from ascriptions made by others and how this process influences their self-formation. The participants made meaning by drawing on personal and cultural stories relating to their racialisation and recognition. Interestingly, they merged stories that contextualised their experiences in relation to other Muslims, defined and strengthened a collective identity and blurred essentialised images of Norwegian Muslims and mainstream society. These meaning-making processes illustrate that the self-formation of racialised minorities is shaped by storytelling across different levels of social life and is both constrained by and emerges from social contexts. The findings emphasise the benefits of moving beyond singular voices and ideal types, particularly when studying categories of difference.

Given the markedly disruptive and subversive tendency of education and the irrefutable political basis of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, scholarship, since the beginning, was meant to be a struggle of a specific kind. However, scholarship as struggle in our times suggests worryingly fresh territories of concern pertaining to the broader operational domain of the academic community. In this piece, we intend to reflect on scholarship as struggle via dwelling on (a) caution and risk-taking in academia, (b) 'sanctity' of code of conduct, and (c) the academic being. Our engagement with these themes is informed by personal experiences both within and outside the academy, and the broad frame of political ethics that informs our scholarship.

In Sweden, as in many countries, immigrant youth tend to exhibit higher educational aspirations than native-born youth, yet their attainment often falls short of their greater ambitions. This study, resulting from a research project focused on educational transitions in two Swedish municipalities, explores two mechanisms that help explain the aspirations-attainment paradox among immigrant youth. The first mechanism, "cooling out," involves a lowering of aspirations as youth encounter barriers-either structural or personal-within the educational system, leading them to adjust their goals downward. The second mechanism is "branching out," which refers to situations arising when immigrant youth become aware of new career paths and educational opportunities as they progress through their schooling. This leads them to adjust their aspirations based on a broader understanding of the possibilities available to them. Using qualitative data gathered through interviews with immigrant students, this study sheds light on how cooling out and branching out unfold as these students reconcile their initial educational ambitions with the realities they encounter. Contributing to a broader understanding of how immigrant youth navigate educational trajectories and transitions, the study reveals that many students actively resist being cooled out by pursuing alternative pathways to their goals and working independently to sustain high ambitions despite discouragement and institutional constraints.