British Journal of Sociology最新文献

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.

This paper argues for a re-enchantment of studies of contemporary climate change activism. It focuses upon Christian climate activists in the UK and how they are reinterpreting their theological beliefs in ways that mobilise religious communities. We employ a social movement framing perspective to discover the nature of this 'interpretative work' using data from a survey (n = 319) and in-depth interviews (n = 62) with Anglicans and Catholics in three church dioceses, a Christian aid agency, and two Christian social movement groups. We found that familiar 'stewardship' framings of Christian climate activism dominated in institutional contexts but gave way to 'prophetic' framings in Christian social movements. Prophetic framings of climate activism have received very little attention compared with stewardship, but they provide strong theological justification and a distinct emotional inflection to Christian participation in climate protest, and form a bridge to groups like Extinction Rebellion. Prophetic framings were, however, open to prognostic disputes, and remained within an anthropocentric discourse on climate change. With Christians comprising about one third of the world's population, it is of global significance to the environmental movement that in certain enclaves and across denominations, Christian beliefs are being reinterpreted in ways that can lead to their mobilisation not just as 'climate stewards' caring for creation, but as 'climate prophets' engaged in political protest.

Sociologists of knowledge production have long explored how scholars tackle empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges. This article highlights a parallel process: the accumulation of moral justifications for pursuing knowledge in specific fields, which we term normative cumulation. As researchers face normative objections and dilemmas, they develop new moral justifications for their work. Researchers' interpretive work leads some justifications to institutionalize and accumulate over time. These justifications may continue to coexist within the same scholarly community. We examine 20^th-century American family demography as a case study, tracing historically how scholars justified their nascent scholarship through moral arguments linked to perceived social goods that demography produces. Over the history of family demography's development, diverse moral frameworks emerged, coexisting to justify family demographers' work. The article analyzes how shifting moral justifications in twentieth-century American family demography diversified the field's approach, influencing its research agendas and potential societal roles.

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.

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.

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 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.

This article rethinks meritocratic ideology as practical knowledge that transforms through biographies of social and geographical mobility. Drawing on 37 interviews with Black and Muslim Italians living in Britain or returned to Italy, the article shows that meritocracy is rarely invoked as a coherent ideology but works as practical, embodied commonsense about the world order, with Britain leading a hierarchy of European societies. The article explores three dimensions of meritocratic commonsense and racialised minorities' double-consciousness (Du Bois). First, 'meritocratic Britain' is not simply a neoliberal narrative, but draws from postcolonial, intergenerational histories of family migration that include desires for equality and security. Second, participants' encounters with British racism do not necessarily challenge beliefs in meritocratic Britain, as being racialised as 'foreigners' in Italy leaves deeper scars on their sense of identity, belonging and recognition. Third, meritocratic Britain can lose emotional resonance when participants feel desires for connectedness and home that are not satisfied by occupational and educational mobility. By centring racialised minorities' double-consciousness, practical knowledge and struggles for recognition, the article highlights the limitations of false consciousness, misinformation and psychological compensation as explanations for meritocratic belief. Moreover, it unravels how meritocratic narratives transform across life stages.

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.

In Australia, ideals of fairness, merit, and inclusion are said to be reflected in national identity through the concept of the fair go. While the fair go embodies the right to fair opportunities for success, regardless of personal background, its application to migrants remains a politically and socially contested issue. In existing international scholarship, the exclusion of migrants is often associated with ethnic and economic nationalist beliefs or the anti-elite sentiments of right-wing populists. However, there is little extant research on the way these beliefs sit alongside egalitarian and meritocratic discourses of fairness in a society. This paper explores whether commitment to the fair go influences public opinion on migration more strongly than established sets of beliefs. Drawing on a new module of fairness beliefs within the nationally representative Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), we explore whether individuals who endorse the principle of equal opportunity are also more likely to hold positive attitudes towards migration. We find that diverse beliefs about the fair go cluster around egalitarian, meritocratic and redistributive ideas of fairness. Our findings have implications for fairness-based arguments in favour of migrant inclusion in Australia and around the world.