British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Family financial assistance with home ownership has attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, the role of culture and ethnicity, transnational ties, and migration in this practice remains significantly under-addressed. By drawing on interviews conducted with donors and recipients of family financial assistance with home ownership in Australia who had personal and recent family experiences of migration, this article begins to address this topic. The findings show that participants from migrant backgrounds often evoke culture and ethnicity while discussing family cultures of transmission and cultural preferences for owner occupied housing, and that they use culture as a means of deflecting potentially uncomfortable questions about fairness and equity. The findings also suggest that family financial assistance can be considered to facilitate a final stage of migrant settling which may take place years after the migrant arrives in Australia. Finally, the findings show that transnational families remain highly interconnected both emotionally and financially, and may provide financial assistance with home ownership as part of family wealth strategies through which transnational families pool resources for collective advantage. Drawing on these findings, the article shows that migration plays a crucial, and underappreciated, role in the provision and receipt of family financial assistance with home ownership. It ultimately argues that popular conversations and academic studies in the multicultural societies in which debates about the asset economy are most active (the US, the UK, Australia) have been dominated by Anglo-centric experiences, and have not considered how these arrangements may extend beyond national borders, and invites scholars in this area to more fully consider the role of migration in research on families and wealth.

Romantic repartnering in later life has received substantial scholarly and public attention in light of population aging and changes in family dynamics. In the United States, the importance of household wealth as a means to support basic welfare needs means that questions of dating and repartnering are complicated by financial considerations. This is particularly true with regard to preserving family wealth for children and grandchildren. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups with 68 adults aged 55 to 92 in Phoenix, Arizona, we explore older adults' concerns about wealth in their decisions to date and repartner. Respondents describe desires to protect wealth for future generations and to evade financial tensions in intergenerational relationships. In this context, many respondents see new romantic partnerships as a potential threat to their control over family wealth. Faced with these concerns, older adults adopt relationship strategies designed to maintain some informality in their relationships-living apart together and no government marriage-which they believe will help them avoid the financial repercussions of repartnering. These findings highlight how older adults balance family concerns and plans about financial transfers with desires to date and repartner in later life. While previous research highlights the ways that marriage shapes wealth accumulation over the life-course, these findings suggest the opposite may also be true. For older adults seeking to repartner, a lifetime of accumulated assets-and the desire to transmit these to kin-may shape the types of romantic relationships they pursue, and in particular, may lead to avoiding formalizing new relationships through marriage.

Prior literature on gender and wealth accumulation largely examines the role of families in reproducing inequalities. However, less attention has been paid to families without sons, a significant demographic, particularly within China's one-child generation, that challenges conventional understandings of familial wealth dynamics. This study addresses this gap by proposing a new conceptual framework: families as sequential and interconnected sites and agents of wealth accumulation across the life course. It specifically applies this framework to investigate the experiences of siblingless daughters from China's one-child generation. Drawing upon 82 individual interviews, this research argues that families are dynamic and sequentially unfolding sites of wealth transfers, acting as both enablers and limiters of women's wealth accumulation. This perspective reveals how family structures, resources, and roles transform and interact at various life-course stages. The findings demonstrate that siblingless daughters are significant recipients of wealth transfers-including cash, valuables, and property-from multiple givers across key life-course stages such as university education, career entry, and marriage and childbirth. While wealth transfers within natal families are often relatively uncontested, access to marital wealth remains highly contingent on women's adherence to patriarchal expectations, particularly childbearing and the production of male heirs. By highlighting a life-course lens and the evolving, relational nature of family-based wealth transfers, this study exposes consistent yet competing relationships and power dynamics. It reveals instances of merit-based opportunity within these dynamics, alongside the reinforcement of enduring patriarchal constraints. This new conceptualisation not only allows for a deeper examination of persistent patriarchal constraints as they evolve and accumulate across life-course points, but also exposes niche spaces where some women negotiate and potentially subvert these constraints to accumulate wealth. Therefore, this study advances research on gender and wealth by illuminating the complex interplay of familial relationships, resources, and roles across the sequential life course.

Congruence between teacher and student perceptions of student academic attitudes reflects positive teacher-student relationships and enables teachers to adjust to students' needs. This study investigates discrepancies between teacher and student perceptions of student's school enjoyment and effort, and whether these discrepancies are associated with student SES. It also tests one mechanism—student visibility—that may be driving the association with student SES. We draw on representative survey data on children at the end of primary school in England and Scotland and use a residual method to compute perceptual discrepancies. We find that teachers significantly rate the effort and enjoyment of low SES students more negatively and the same attitudes for high SES students more positively compared to what the students' own reports would suggest. The association between SES and teacher-student perceptual discrepancies remains significant even when SES-differences in student visibility, captured through student prior ability and behaviour, are considered.

With reference to Simmel's work, this article puts forward the notion of ‘stranger views’, which are expressive on the one hand, of the experiences of those who occupy a marginal position in society characterised by experiences of belonging and non-belonging, and on the other, of our own position as researchers, probing spaces of non-belonging and hearing stories that are then rearticulated for an academic audience. In doing so, it provides a reflective dialog between the findings of a research project on migrant homelessness in the UK and the methodological framework brought by New Area Studies. The article deploys the life story research method and focuses on views of the UK from the perspective of migrants from former European colonies who have been in the UK for several years but whose immigration status and lack of economic capital renders them vulnerable to destitution and homelessness. The article offers unique insights into the co-existence of belonging and non-belonging and the dissonance between these feelings. In providing a dialog between accounts deriving from life story interviews with migrants experiencing homelessness and a self-critical reflection about the knowledge produced with such accounts, our article contributes to debates on the sociology of marginality with a three-tiered discussion of migration, homelessness and methodological frameworks, which are rarely considered together.

Perspectives on neoliberal political-economic practice often frame its dominance in terms of harms to ‘society’. Prominently, Wendy Brown (2019, 52) offers an account of the ‘neoliberal revolution’, claiming that, when ‘the social vanishes from our ideas, speech, and experience’, commonality disappears, democracy diminishes, and authoritarianism prevails. The paper considers this understanding to argue for the importance of political articulations of ‘society’, which reveal complexities that elude nostalgic accounts of how the social has been lost. Making this case, it works through real-world invocations of social commonality in the name of social cohesion. Social cohesion illustrates the multiplicity of objectives invoking ‘society’, ranging from the production of pro-social subjects to the pursuit of resilience against shifting scenarios of social collapse. On this basis the paper problematises perspectives that either treat the social as an artefact of administrative practice or that prioritize experiences of moral purpose and commonality. It argues that such positions risk mythologizing ‘society’ if they don't attend to the complex circumstances of its political articulation.

The most recent British census was the first to elicit transgender identity. The 2021 Census of England and Wales asked ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’. It is has been argued that this formulation confused a substantial number of respondents who erroneously answered in the negative. The 2022 Census of Scotland asked a clearer question, ‘Do you consider yourself to be trans, or have a trans history?’ Comparison between the results provides further evidence that the Census of England and Wales overestimated the transgender population, and also raises the possibility that it undercounted the non-binary component of this population.