British Journal of Sociology最新文献

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.

This article examines civil society organisations working to enhance social mobility in England, especially through higher education. Against the backdrop of neoliberal governance, we investigate whether these organisations operate as protective counter-movements resisting marketisation or as institutional mechanisms that stabilise the inequalities they aim to address. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's concept of the ‘double movement’ and Nancy Fraser's critique of marketised social protections, we map and analyse over 100 charities and non-profits established since 1992. We combined qualitative coding of organisational websites across nine Fraserian dimensions with Latent Profile Analysis to identify structural patterns within the field. Findings reveal that most organisations balance critical framings of inequality with funder-compatible, technocratic delivery models. We argue this structural ambivalence is a defining feature of civil society under neoliberalism and show how the social mobility industry operates to suggest symbolic reform without redistributive transformation. Our contribution is threefold: we provide the first systematic typology of the UK's social mobility sector, extend Polanyi and Fraser's theoretical frameworks into social mobility and education policy, and offer a methodological model combining qualitative and quantitative methods with AI-assisted research.

Due to their geographical dispersion, many families face challenges in exchanging support over long distances. While family theories emphasise the importance of a systemic approach to family relationships, reciprocity—a core feature of these relationships—is still predominantly studied within specific dyads, such as the parent-child relationship, rather than within the broader family network and its spatial context. This study addresses this gap by examining whether family members reciprocally exchange material and emotional support, and how these exchanges relate to spatial characteristics at three levels: the individual (past migration, degree of urbanisation), the dyadic tie (physical distance between members) and the network (spatial dispersion). Using a national sample of 549 adults living in Switzerland, who named important family members and identified available support, we apply a multilevel network approach. Results show that only reciprocity in material support declines with residential distance when controlling for both in-person and remote contact. Moreover, reciprocity is more likely in large, tightly-knit families, and—specifically for emotional support—in spatially dispersed ones. This last finding suggests that reciprocating emotional support is a key mechanism through which families maintain long-distance relationships. Another takeaway is that cultivating mutually supportive ties must be understood not only through dyadic distance and contact between individual members, but in relation to the spatial and network context of the family as a whole.