British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Elites are increasingly visible in academic and political discourse owing to their disproportionate power in shaping policy. For the most part, however, elites have been viewed in race-blind terms. In this paper, we advance a racialized perspective on elite studies by highlighting three salient ways that race matters for elite views on inequality and redistribution. First, we focus on elites as racialized actors whose racial identities impact their perspectives on social policies. Second, we examine the effect of holding a historical perspective of racialized inequality on elites' redistributive preferences. Third, we highlight the importance of attending to the racialization of social policies, distinguishing between redistributive measures framed in race-neutral and race-conscious terms. We demonstrate the utility of a racialized approach to elite studies by analyzing survey data collected from political, economic, and civil service elites in South Africa. Findings show that elites' racialized identities shape their redistributive preferences, as do their historical understandings of racialized inequality, but these effects vary depending on whether elites are evaluating race-conscious or race-neutral policies.

Studies consistently find family background differences in educational attainment, with parental education being an important factor in families' educational decision-making processes. Alongside parents’ own resources and accomplishments, research has shown that both immaterial and material resources from extrafamilial connections, such as extended family members, are positively associated with children's educational attainment and may compensate for a lack of resources within the immediate family. In this study, we examine the compensatory role of parental workplace ties in shaping children's educational choices. Using full population register data from Finland, we find that children from lower-educated families are more likely to enrol in higher education if they have a parent working among highly educated colleagues. We discuss the importance of diverse environments for educational mobility and aim to shed new light on the role of weak ties in educational decision-making.

There is increasing recognition of the use of family violence by children and young people, and the need to build the evidence base on understanding this form of violence. Adolescent family violence (AFV, also referred to as adolescent violence in the home) refers to the use of violence by a young person against another family member within the home, and can include physical, verbal, emotional, psychological, financial and/or sexual abuse and property damage. This article presents findings from a secondary analysis of data from the Adolescent Family Violence in Australia (AFVA) study—the first national study of the nature, prevalence and impacts of AFV in Australia. The AFVA study involved an online survey of 5021 young people aged 16–20. Drawing from a subset of this survey data, this article aims to better understand how correlations between disability, poor mental health and use of AFV relate to young people's experiences of child abuse. The findings provide further evidence that young people's use of family violence in the home is interrelated to their own family violence victimisation during childhood. Findings presented here reiterate the need to recognise and respond to children experiencing family violence as victim-survivors in their own right. Early and age-appropriate child-centred interventions would create opportunities to mitigate adverse outcomes, including poor mental health and the intergenerational transmission of violence.

This paper uses Bourdieu's concepts of cultural and social capital to critically examine death administration in the UK. Death administration relates to a set of tasks that bereaved individuals (usually a family member) must complete when someone dies-such as probate, asset management and funeral planning. It is a hidden form of administration which is complex, contradictory and often challenging to complete. Drawing on data from qualitative research, the paper shows how death administration is a relational activity which requires people to draw upon and transmit different forms of cultural capital (embodied, objectified and institutional) across life and death. Such capital is strongly mediated by family, and by a bereaved individual's ability to mobilise a wider set of social networks and resources. The article concludes by highlighting the ways in which the overall volume of capital bereaved individuals possess affects their ability to successfully navigate death administration. By bringing Bourdieu's theory of cultural and social capital together in a new empirical area, and by illuminating capital transmission across the boundaries of life and death, the paper offers an original conceptual contribution. By analysing new empirical data on death administration, the paper also extends the substantive focus of research on death and dying.

Childcare benefits are an important policy instrument to increase the use of formal childcare and often women's participation in the labour market. However, lower-educated parents continue to make less use of childcare benefits and subsequently less use of formal childcare services. We argue that lower-educated parents are potentially less knowledgeable about childcare benefit regulations, a knowledge gap that may be explained by educational differences in access to childcare benefit information through parents' social networks. Analysing a representative sample of parents in the Netherlands, we find that lower-educated parents indeed have less knowledge about childcare benefits than more educated parents. We also find that while there are no educational differences in access to strong ties (e.g., family and friends) and weak ties (e.g., acquaintances and neighbours) as sources of information, lower-educated parents benefit more from weak ties for knowledge acquisition than intermediate and higher educated parents. We discuss our findings in light of the current debate on the relevance of systemic knowledge about welfare state services for reducing societal inequalities.

A significant body of literature highlights the fluid and adaptable nature of racial categories in Latin America, often invoking the concept of ‘whitening’ to explain how upwardly mobile individuals reshape their racial or ethnic identities by adopting cultural and social traits associated with class privilege and ‘whiteness’. This study builds on these discussions. Drawing on 42 interviews, it examines the racial imprints of class mobility within Lima's dominant class, focussing particularly on ‘Mestizos’ in the sample. I show that upward mobility has distinct racialised effects for this group, especially when contrasted with the experiences of their ‘Afro-Peruvian’ counterparts. Whereas for the latter, upward social mobility engenders little change to their racial status, for ‘Mestizos’, it involves shedding the stigmatised racial label ‘Cholo’. Rather than achieving a symbolically higher racial status, for ‘Mestizos’ mobility prompts a process I term ‘decolouring’, characterised by distancing from racial stigma and navigating a heightened sense of racial ambiguity.

In the last several years, disaster insurance programs around the world have experienced disruptions that many observers interpret to be a primary symptom of "climate crisis" (Bittle 2024). Governments have responded to these disruptions through disjointed and at times contradictory measures: they treat disasters, alternately, as "Acts of God" that should be a collective responsibility, or as the result of decisions that can be attributed to individual agency. This article argues that such shifts between mutualism and individualization in disaster insurance are symptoms of an "irrationalization" of disaster policy. The concept of irrationalization, derived from the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe (1973), describes the process of goal identification and policy formulation of contemporary states as they navigate simultaneously valid but ultimately contradictory principles of political morality and governmental rationality. Through case studies of two disaster insurance programs in the US-the National Flood Insurance Program and property insurance in California, which covers wildfires-the article shows that irrationalization processes are becoming more marked as disasters grow ever larger and costlier, fueled by climate change and other anthropogenic causes. It also suggests that the concept of irrationalization offers insight into the emerging forms of "climate crisis" that are unfolding in disaster policy and other domains. The concept of climate crisis is frequently invoked to designate the ruptural change that will follow from global warming, and to both summon and justify radical action to address problems that are attributed to a particular causal or moral agent. But in the context of the irrationalization of disaster policy, technical and moral attributions are uncertain and disputed. Disasters generate political conflict and crisis-driven reorganization rather than decisive courses of action.

In recent decades, non-voting among the British working class has increased substantially, contributing to widening class-based inequality in electoral participation. This study examines the impact of occupational class mobility on the intergenerational transmission of electoral participation in two ways. First, by applying Diagonal Reference Models to data from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study covering eight General Elections. Through this, we estimate the impact of mobility on the relative influence of class of origin and class of destination. Second, by examining patterns of non-voting during the early years of adulthood in order to estimate the degree to which class patterns of non-voting among occupationally mature adults reflect processes of prior self-selection, rather than the pattern of non-voting associated with occupational class of destination. The findings indicate that upwardly mobile individuals are more likely to vote, but only after they have experienced occupational mobility into the middle class, thus suggesting a process of acculturation into the class of destination that diminishes the influence of their class origins. Conversely, individuals who are downwardly mobile from the middle class are less likely to vote. However, this lower level of participation is already apparent earlier in life, before they experience adult occupational mobility. This suggests a pre-existing pattern indicative of selection effects. These dynamics, in the context of balanced patterns of upward and downward mobility, reinforce class inequalities in electoral participation and suggest that relative differences in turnout between social classes are likely to remain stable or even widen.

This paper examines how working-class young people enroled at college in London, Rochdale and Morecambe perceive of university. It argues that university represents a great risk, associated with high levels of debt, which does deter some students, but at the same time, university is imagined as a meaningful vehicle for dignity and respect, which students place greater value on than the prospect of benefitting from the so-called “graduate premium”. Broadly, then, it argues that the desire to attend university is predicated on three factors: the calculation of risk versus reward, the “migrant effect” for the children of migrants or those who migrated directly, and thirdly, the pursuit of dignity and respect.

How are capital and the family interconnected in contemporary capitalism? In this article, we argue that they come together in owning relations. By owning capital across generations, families bridge the temporal gap between the durability of capital and the finite lifespan of private property holders and thus resolve the problem of bona vacantia. We posit that the ownership of capital influences the structure and practices of families. Vice versa family centered ownership of capital actively shapes economic processes. Making sense of how capital and the family are interlinked contributes to our understanding of the perpetuation and concentration of wealth as well as of contemporary forms of political economies. Lastly, we point to the social inequality stemming from family-centered owning relations and explore potential alternatives.