British Journal of Sociology最新文献

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.

One of the current focal points of ethnicity research is the relationship between ethnic identity and social inequality. This paper examines how immigrants' understandings of ethnicity are influenced by class. Through life-history interviews with 28 Chinese immigrants in the UK, I focus on the experiences and feelings of immigrants from different social classes crossing borders, as well as how these experiences influence their understanding of ethnicity and identity, which often involve ethnically salient situations and the ways they draw ethnic boundaries. By focussing on immigrants' citizenship acquisition and work strategy development, I show three ways that class affects ethnicity: the extent of barriers when crossing borders, the ability to use transnational capital, and the forms of solidarity. This work contributes to the study of the intersection between ethnicity and class, revealing the heterogeneity of Chinese immigrants in the UK from a class perspective.

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.

The article is concerned with an issue which is not comprehensively covered in the broad 'living with difference' literature on encounters in public places: What makes the city's diverse strangers actually interact face-to-face? Drawing on long-term urban ethnography in Oslo, Norway, the article explores 'contact-supporting circumstances' in urban public space: basic circumstances that authorise or encourage convivial chance interactions among diverse strangers. The research reveals that a wide range of circumstances support such interaction, principally 'exposed and openings positions' and 'mutual openness'. In categorising and empirically substantiating these circumstances, which mostly have been investigated as individual material or social factors, the study adds to existing work in the fields of everyday multiculturalism, conviviality and their like. It does so by expanding upon a lesser-known part of Goffman's pioneering interactionist work, demonstrating how Goffmanian microsocial concepts can help portray diversity or multiculturalism as an interactional reality and thus open up original perspectives to 'larger' societal issues.

Do birds of a feather really sing together? Musicians face two competing pressures in the pursuit of success: conforming to genre norms to meet audience expectations and distinguishing themselves to attract the attention of listeners. These opposing logics may shape how artists choose their collaborators. Partnering with similar artists can reinforce genre alignment, while working with dissimilar collaborators may help artists stand out. This paper explores how these dynamics play out through the lens of homophily in musical collaboration. Drawing on network analysis, we develop a framework for measuring cultural proximity using song-level and collaboration data sourced from Spotify's API. Focusing on the understudied genre of Grime, we investigate whether the pull of similarity-the tendency to form homophilous ties-overrides competitive pressures within the genre.

A defining feature of cultural capital is its propensity for accumulation and the potential of its convertibility. However, there are a lack of studies that would explore how different forms of cultural capital could be employed as an advantage. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the effect of cultural capital on achieving educational outcomes while utilising a detailed array of questions focused on cultural practices and taste. The study is based on two waves of a longitudinal survey of the 2016-18 cohort of students at Charles University (N = 5127/2020). The analysis employs a categorical principal components analysis to measure established and emerging forms of embodied cultural capital. The results show that while institutionalised cultural capital has a significant effect on the likelihood of completing a university education, embodied cultural capital has no such effect, regardless of whether we focus on established or emerging forms. However, the convertibility of embodied cultural capital is substantial when the analysis focuses on study-abroad experiences during tertiary education. These results can be explained from the perspective of differentiated parallel areas of social space-one that relies on locally powerful state institutions, such as a national education system, and another that is part of the global space of cultural hierarchies centered in core European economic and cultural centers.

This piece examines the systematic erosion of academic freedom and the institutionalized censorship and repression of academics in Iran following the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, where universities have been reshaped into extensions of the security state through ideological vetting, pervasive surveillance, and the purging of dissenting scholars. These practices marked by the weaponization of livelihoods and the silencing of critical disciplines, are situated within a broader authoritarian strategy with implications far beyond Iran's borders. By connecting domestic repression to global debates on academic freedom, including rising political pressures and contentious crises in Western universities, the piece highlights the urgent need for international accountability and protective frameworks.

Theory proposes that more legitimate cultural tastes can be converted into social capital. Yet, existing research is ill-suited for supporting a causal interpretation of the effect of cultural capital on social capital and often measures social connections (whom you know) rather than social capital (the resources you can extract from the people you know). To address these limitations, we use three-generation data from Denmark, three complementary identification strategies, and data that capture directly the resources individuals can extract from social connections (e.g., help finding a home or a job). Across all three identification strategies (controlling for observables, comparing siblings, and an instrumental variable design), results show that more (highbrow) cultural consumption has a positive effect on individuals' access to valuable resources embedded in social networks, a result consistent with what we label the "Cultured means Connected" hypothesis. We end by considering the implications of our results for research on the role of cultural tastes in accessing resources and shaping inequality.

This paper explores gendered dynamics of meritocracy by examining how the meritocratic ideology is either perpetuated or contested within two highly selective university programs with contrasting gender compositions. Through an analysis of interviews with students from two of the most selective and sought-after programs in Denmark, the study examines the students' perceptions of meritocracy, deservingness, legitimacy and their views on the gender imbalance of their program. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of capital conversion, symbolic capital, and meritocracy as a legitimating ideology, the analysis shows that while students in both programs have succeeded within a merit-based system, the meritocratic ideology is upheld in the male-majority program and contested in the female-majority program. The paper suggests that women may encounter a meritocratic glass ceiling, which prevents them from accessing the legitimacy and self-assurance that typically accompany success in an educational system grounded in meritocratic ideology.