British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Desertion from the military does not turn soldiers into civilians. In this paper, I analyse military identity and embodied practices of soldiers who deserted from the Zimbabwe National Army and were exiled in South Africa. Soldiering is understood as an essence part of who they are, as men who risked their lives and invested in a career, which they later deserted. These soldiers had a particular sense of a military past which functioned at the discursive level: even though they blamed the military for making them leave the barracks, they thought of themselves as soldiers in a context of exile. The men whose narratives are presented in this paper joined the army in post-independence Zimbabwe, and they did not participate in the country's liberation war against the British. These men have a different understanding of themselves as soldiers to those who fought in the liberation war. Their sense of themselves, and others in and outside the military is fundamentally drawn from a professional army. As is often noted, the military is greedy in terms of its demands on its members, and consequently it embeds within military personnel lasting practices, ways of being and a sense of a military identity, all of which can be resistant to change, yet simultaneously resilient, even in a context of exile. I therefore suggest that the experience of civilian life alone does little to erode the practices and mind frames of the military ingrained into army deserters even outside the army. This seems to be the case in a number of African societies where military desertion is prevalent, especially in authoritarian regimes.

There is a variety of conceptions of the public role that sociology ought to play. Perhaps the most common one presents it as serving a critical or oppositional function, not least in relation to governments and their policies. Yet this has by no means always been the dominant conception of sociology's role. In his well-known typology, Michael Burawoy recognised ‘professional’ and ‘policy’ versions of the discipline, alongside ‘critical’ and ‘public’ ones. However, even this does not capture the full range of variation in view about sociology's public role. There can be divergencies within each of Burawoy's categories. And it is worth taking account of these in order to gain a clear sense of all the possibilities. In this spirit, what is offered here is an examination of contrasting approaches that would fall under Burawoy's heading of policy sociology. These come from two key figures who had considerable influence on twentieth-century social and political thought—Karl Mannheim and Karl Popper. While they both believed that the function of social science is to serve government policymaking, and both were committed to democracy, they took very different views about sociology's relationship to governance. Indeed, Popper sharply criticised Mannheim's position, condemning it as totalitarian. The issues these authors addressed remain of considerable significance today, and this paper explores what can be learnt from their differences in perspective, as well as from what they shared.

Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on ‘earning while learning’ (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experiences have received limited attention and constitute something of a ‘black box’. We open that box by examining the paid work undertaken by full-time students. Through analysis of a national data set, we examine patterns with respect to employment rates, pay, hours, and occupations, as well as how these are gendered. We find a small ‘studentness’ penalty—lower pay for students than non-student workers of the same age. We also find small increases in the proportion currently engaged in paid work. Gender is identified as a key variable in shaping student employment rates, with women considerably more likely than men to work while studying. We find no evidence of a gender pay gap in EwL, but this is largely because most student workers are concentrated in two ‘integrated’ occupations, which we designate as ‘equally bad’ - poorly paid but gender equitable. Older students are more likely to work in gender-segregated occupations, with some indications of male and female gender pay advantages for gender-dominant employment, suggesting a possible early incentive for occupational gender segregation. Given the gender disparity in student work, a core finding is that women disproportionately undertake this poor-quality work. We argue that to address the under-theorisation of EwL, student employment—including its gendering—requires greater attention and should be integrated into conceptualisations of a ‘working-life-course’.

Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper conceives the adoption and development of artificial intelligence by businesses as a strategy within the economic field. Using a survey of over 2000 businesses in the UK and tools of geometric data analysis, I construct a model of the British economic field and project into it indicators of past, present and intended AI adoption. This provides a sense of the correspondences between the structure of the field, the temporal order of strategies, and perceptions of the possible and necessary among its agents. Dominant players within the field have clearly led and will lead the AI ‘revolution’, rendering AI a tool for perpetuating intra-field domination and reproduction, but others below them seem set to pursue emulation strategies to keep up. These conservation strategies may also contain, however, an internal difference between innovation and dependence corresponding with the new and the old within the field.

Recent years witnessed mass migration towards Europe, from Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the 2015 Migrant Crisis linked to war in Syria. This article explores UK government discussion around these two significant crises, focussing on the challenges they present and the portrayal of refugees. It asks how far ministers' language differentiated between Ukrainians and Syrians regarding welfare deservingness. Thematically analysing over 100 official speeches, statements and press releases, the extent of racialisation and welfare chauvinism in ministers' discourse on refugees is revealed. Clear racialisation was found between the two refugee groups, but welfare chauvinism persisted for Ukrainians despite more favourable language, reflecting continued conditionality within UK government discussions of migration phenomena that may hold long-term implications for Ukrainian refugees in the UK.

In the last decade, the “decolonial turn” has gained prominence across academic disciplines, challenging inherent Eurocentric knowledge paradigms. Extending these conversations, this paper critically investigates the notion of “the global” from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial scholars criticize the mainstream conceptualization of cosmopolitanism for its Eurocentrism and advocate for alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. This paper builds on this decolonial scholarship and examines how various local actors make sense of and give meaning to the contested category of “the global” in understanding, articulating, and addressing their visions for social change. Drawing from ethnographic research on queer activism in South Korea, it identifies the coexistence and contestation between two forms of cosmopolitanism—metrocentric and provincial—and suggests that we understand non-Western activists as producers of anticolonial thought from below. By doing so, this paper contributes to critical scholarship on globalization, cosmopolitanism, and decolonial thought.

In 2023, China introduced regulatory amendments to birth certificates and the hukou (household registration) system, aiming to boost birth rates and offset an aging population. However, the implications of these changes on marriage and family support amidst population policy shifts remain underexplored. One particular area is how commercial surrogacy (CS) impacts gay communities where couples seek surrogate children to maintain intergenerational bonding and bridging within their familial and kinship networks. This article employs Bourdieu's field theory, characterized by class-based capital and habitus, to examine how upper-class gay individuals navigate this changing field in the three municipal cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 35 upper-class gay fathers and 21 gays' parents, their agency and changes in pursuing parenthood through transnational and underground CS in China are illustrated. This article posits that the formation of the family is inherently tied to the class-based cultural capital and habitus of the gay individuals. The reproductive decision-making process within the gay community reflect strategies to form families are imbued with class-based capital and habitus.