British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Class identity is a crucial sociological concept, but is only ever measured at the individual level. In this paper, we ask: do groups have class identities? And do those class identities correspond with material resources? To answer these questions, we examine data from 31 of the most prominent American religious denominations in the early 20th century. We find that religious groups expressed palpable class identities in their denominational periodicals, and that these identities were broadly aligned with these groups' material resources. This study suggests that studying class identity at the group level can deepen our understanding of inequality-both in the highly stratified field of organized religion, and among organizations and other social groupings more generally.

How do those who are pulling away economically justify their advantageous positions? This issue has acquired salience in the context of rising inequalities and propelled a reflourishing of sociological analysis focused on elites. This article contributes to this literature by enquiring into the status legitimations and interconnected boundary-makings of one particular elite fraction: the tech elite. Even though this grouping is at the forefront of a transformation of the field of power, it remains surprisingly underexplored in the social sciences. To address this lacuna, this study undertakes a case study of the prominent startup accelerator 'Y Combinator' (YC). This accelerator, which has been shaped by Sam Altman and other leading figures in the US tech industry, not only invests financially in startups but also seeks to provide mentorship and expertise to aspiring founders. The article analyses the latter cultural activities by drawing on interviews, lectures, essays, and blogs from the YC online library. Based on qualitative analysis, three central codification principles are reconstructed from the data. Firstly, successful tech entrepreneurs are treated as missionary selves, a quasi-religious framing which goes hand-in-hand with moral boundaries vis-à-vis actors who are deemed materialist and risk-averse. Secondly, the discourse imagines the ideal tech entrepreneur as talented rather than just hardworking. This creates a cultural boundary which operates within the logic of merit-scarcity and thereby serves to legitimate extreme inequalities and the winner-takes-most markets that dominate the tech industry. Thirdly, tech entrepreneurs are construed as fulfillers of real-world needs of the masses. This framing counters public criticisms levelled at tech and echoes the rhetoric of populist political actors, while also allowing to establish moral boundaries vis-à-vis other elite fractions, such as finance. Finally, the article discusses the reconstructed codifications and boundary-makings in relation to data on the socio-structural positions of actors within the startup accelerator.

Work mediated by digital labour platforms is often framed as flexible and autonomous, yet accessing paid tasks commonly requires extensive unpaid effort. Drawing on 65 qualitative interviews with Australian workers on project-based platforms (including Airtasker, Fiverr and Freelancer), we develop the concept of anticipatory labour: the unpaid, future-oriented work through which workers search for tasks, evaluate jobs and clients, and negotiate terms before any paid work begins. Anticipatory labour is not peripheral but constitutive of participation in platform labour markets, demanding sustained time, attention and emotional energy amid uncertainty and competition. We show that anticipatory labour is gendered. While all workers engage in these practices, women perform more anticipatory labour and experience it more intensely, often alongside unpaid domestic and care labour. Women's anticipatory labour is also more affectively charged, shaped by hope, anxiety and self-doubt as they manage risks to reputation, safety and future employability. Men, by contrast, report less anticipatory labour and more confidence in securing work. We argue that anticipatory labour operates as a mechanism of platform governance, shifting responsibility for employability onto workers and converting unpaid time and emotion into the conditions of participation in the gig economy. In doing so, platforms reproduce gendered inequalities while sustaining the promise of flexibility.

What is 'missed' by sociological literature underpinned by assumptions of presence that a missing approach can rectify? I appropriate a metaphysics of presence and an alternative focus on what is missing as ontological foci to revisit complexity studies in sociology. I review key themes therein and show that, by predominantly adopting a being-laden set of metaphysical assumptions, the complexity discourse overlooks subtler and more nuanced aspects of elucidating social settings. By attuning ourselves to what is missing, I make a case for what the possible consequences of this overlooking might be while showing the theorizing inadequacies of complexity thinking, which rests squarely on tangibility and observability of Aristotelian entities.

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.

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.