British Journal of Sociology最新文献

In his classic work L'ancien régime et la révolution, Alexis de Tocqueville proposes a reinterpretation of the French Revolution: behind the spectacular ruptures associated with the event, profound continuities are at play. Beyond the specific case of the French Revolution, Tocqueville calls for vigilance in mobilizing the notion of revolution to account for historical dynamics. In this contribution, I propose to apply this vigilance to account for the supposed "Big Data revolution" in the field of European insurance. Most observers of the sector-whether professionals or academic-agree that the arrival of Big Data represents a major rupture. This break would call into question the business model of insurance companies, stabilized for 250 years around the principle of risk pooling, since it would now be possible to individualize risk management. This individualization of risk management would then reconfigure the nature of solidarity and the social bond at work within Western societies, which, since the end of the 19th century, have been constituted as "insurance societies" (Ewald 1986). On the contrary, I defend the idea that these ruptures are only apparent, incomplete or unfinished, and that the "Big Data Revolution" masks profound continuities, by mobilizing two arguments: attempts to individualize risk management long predate the advent of big data; and attempts to individualize risk management based on big data are, to date, inconclusive.

Insurance serves as a social good, providing financial protection against disasters whilst operating within a profit-driven market. This dual role highlights the complex intersection of social and commercial interests, raising a fairness puzzle often portrayed as a trade-off between solidarity and actuarial fairness. Insurance organisations adhere to actuarial fairness by setting insurance premiums proportional to each individual's risk. As extreme weather drives greater losses in high-risk areas, actuarial fairness often results in unaffordable premiums for many. To address this, societies may adopt principles of solidarity fairness to subsidise their premiums. However, this approach threats diminishing personal responsibility to contain risk, as individuals may rely on subsidised protection rather than taking proactive measures. This study draws on a longitudinal qualitative study of a government-legislated insurance organisation to develop a process framework that reconceptualises fairness in insurance as a duality of solidarity and actuarial fairness. It offers insights into designing insurance systems that are socially equitable and financially sustainable.

Qualitative work highlights the significance of students' interactional cultural capital in educational settings—that is, cultural resources that help to navigate/interact with educational institutions and gatekeepers. We make a first attempt to measure expressions of students' interactional cultural capital quantitatively, and examine their relationship with academic performance. Using data on over 1200 Dutch students in their final year of primary school, we find positive associations between several expressions of students' interactional cultural capital (knowledge about the educational system; perceived cultural match between home and school) and academic performance. These positive relationships are equally strong for teacher- and test-based assessments of performance, suggesting that these forms of cultural capital help students in their learning rather than providing educational benefits via teacher biases. We find little support for positive relations between students' help-seeking strategies and academic performance. Different help-seeking behaviors do not form a unified cultural “strategy” and are not stratified by socio-economic status (SES) as anticipated. For educational knowledge, we find some support for the cultural mobility hypothesis: SES-based performance gaps, particularly in teacher assessments, are smaller among students with greater knowledge of the educational system.

This article examines the relationship between economic elites and civil society by analysing the appointments of corporate elites to the boards of charitable companies in the UK. Whilst previous research has usually focused on who among the corporate elite hold positions in key civil society organisations, and the extent to which these organisations are integrated into corporate networks, we use data on the nature and operations of civil society organisations to identify which are more likely to attract corporate elites as board members. Using a dataset of over thirty-one thousand UK incorporated companies registered with the Charity Commission of England and Wales, we examine the appointments of corporate elite to these organisations over a 10-year period. Based on these appointments, we are able to offer insights into the social networks, values and interests of the corporate elite as a whole. We find that the UK corporate elite are more likely to join the boards of larger, high-status charities, and those that support traditional upper-class culture and class reproduction. We also find they are relatively more likely to join organisations that seek to shape politics and society—such as foundations distributing grants, or think tanks undertaking public policy research and advocacy—than those involved in the provision of welfare and social services. Taken together, the findings are suggestive of a status-seeking, culturally highbrow and secular economic elite, that is more traditional than meritocratic, and more concerned with shaping policy and supporting the institutions of their class, than directly supporting disadvantaged groups.

Organising as workers to build industrial power within our universities is a key element of how we respond to redundancies, marketisation and other political pressures on higher education. This piece argues that academics, as a subset of university workers, must interrogate their own working practices and commit to organising within their workplaces as a form of praxis. Practical steps of what organising might involve and long-term strategic aims are identified drawing on the author's experience of organising within the University and Colleges Union in UK universities.

Inspired by Nigel Dodd's The Social Life of Money, this article proposes an analysis of entangled economic lives, that is, how meaning, structures and politics jointly shape the flow of monies within households. The past decades have marked a shift from "childrearing expenditures" to "parenting investments" that align with new visions of both children and parents. The new social life of money for children revolves less around what Viviana Zelizer decades ago famously called "a priceless child," and more in support of human capital development of children and invested parenting identities. The new ideational schemas are scaffolded by financialization, an exploding parenting product industry, and an aloof state offloading provision for children onto individual parents. Leading entangled economic lives, parents engage in relational work in which they match the sacred child-parent bond with not only culturally appropriate but actually affordable monies for children, creating a new political economy of parenting.