British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Research demonstrates a robust link between marriage and wealth. Wealth facilitates marriage, which then fosters wealth accumulation, resulting in significant net worth disparities between married and cohabiting couples. Does the decline of marriage and growth of cohabitation alter this relationship? Previous research suggests variable outcomes across societies and groups. Wealth gaps may persist (or even widen) where cohabitation emerges primarily due to economic uncertainty or as a prolonged stage preceding marriage. However, gaps might narrow substantially where cohabitation diffuses as an alternative to marriage. Using Canada as a comparative case, this paper explores these dynamics. It contrasts the province of Québec, where cohabitation expanded largely as an alternative to marriage among French-speaking residents, with other provinces as well as Québec's anglophones, where cohabitation spread mostly as a preceding stage to marriage and due to economic insecurity. Leveraging data from Canada's Survey of Financial Security and the Longitudinal Administrative Databank, results indicate that marriage-cohabitation wealth gaps have narrowed substantially in French-speaking Québec since the 1990s compared to other provinces and Québec's English-speakers, in line with theoretical predictions. This change appears to hold for both men and women and to stem largely from weakened associations between wealth and marriage entry, alongside more modest reductions in the wealth gains of marriage among men in Québec. These results suggest that when marriage loses cultural centrality and is replaced by alternative union types, as it has in Québec, its link with wealth accumulation may weaken considerably.

Based on 77 qualitative interviews with professors in higher education, this article explores the interviewees' opinions on how gender disparities in academia should be explained. We show that male professors relate women's career barriers to family factors and women's own interests and preferences. In contrast, female professors favour explanations at the university level, for example lack of recognition of women, implicit bias in evaluations, male networks and an unwelcoming academic culture. Furthermore, we identify a 'silent standpoint' among the participating male professors: the idea that women are generally less qualified than men as candidates for full professorships. The article draws on sociological accounting theories, focussing on the 'excuses' and 'justifications' used by professors when discussing gender issues. Male professors 'excuse' gender disparities in academia by referring to women's preferences or 'justify' them by appealing to meritocratic standards. Entangled in these 'neutralising' accounts is the silent standpoint regarding women's low qualifications, a standpoint, however, that is difficult for male professors to articulate in an interview with a female colleague.

Gender segregation in paid care work offers a critical lens for understanding how gender inequality is reproduced in contemporary societies. While much research has explained men's absence from paid care through cultural and identity-based accounts, less has been done to examine the structural mechanisms that sustain the feminisation of care. This paper addresses that gap by analysing men's experiences in frontline aged and disability care in Australia. Drawing on qualitative data from 41 men across 13 focus groups and 32 follow-up interviews, we find that anxiety around maintaining masculine identities is not a significant barrier. Gender operates primarily through structural and informational processes that make care work insecure, undervalued, and poorly understood. These challenges reflect the gendered devaluation of feminised labour, but are not primarily rooted in masculine identity conflict. We suggest that greater analytic attention to structural barriers is needed, alongside existing insights into identity and agency.

Within classical sociological accounts of capitalism, families are curious remnants of the past. Contemporary elite sociology dismisses the family in a different way: by primarily focusing on individual men. When the family does appear within elite studies, scholars frequently follow a stratification framework, which focuses on the transmission of social position from parents to children. This paper breaks with these dominant tendencies to understand the elite family as a shared site of work. Families are social phenomenon in their own right: they are the makers of capitalist enterprises, and they endure and thrive within capitalism. Children do not simply receive potential positions from their parents; their actions can augment or diminish family social positions. Families are impacted by previous generations' material, socio-cultural and narrative work, and by the work done by various members within a generation. The approach we offer is part of a recent development within the sociology of elites to understand the family as the central unit of analysis, with multiple members (children, siblings, spouses, parents, etc.) serving as units of observation. Our approach foregrounds how gender and sexuality structures he work that families do. We develop our approach by tracing multiple generations of the Astor family.

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.

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.

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.

Given the markedly disruptive and subversive tendency of education and the irrefutable political basis of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, scholarship, since the beginning, was meant to be a struggle of a specific kind. However, scholarship as struggle in our times suggests worryingly fresh territories of concern pertaining to the broader operational domain of the academic community. In this piece, we intend to reflect on scholarship as struggle via dwelling on (a) caution and risk-taking in academia, (b) 'sanctity' of code of conduct, and (c) the academic being. Our engagement with these themes is informed by personal experiences both within and outside the academy, and the broad frame of political ethics that informs our scholarship.