British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Older people have been overlooked in recent debates over the relationship between age, class and culture despite their prevalence and the conceptual questions they raise. Seeking to bridge mainstream class analysis with debates in social gerontology, especially via a shared turn to Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology, this paper draws on survey data from the US to examine not only the class position of older people but their internal social and cultural differentiation. I use geometric data analysis to construct a model of the class system, locate older people within it and then explore differences among older people. I then proceed to compare the cultural symbolisations of social positions among older people to those of the larger sample. The core structures of social and cultural differentiation among older people are roughly homologous with those of the broader sample, but there are also notable differences and even inversions pointing toward the specificity – and autonomy – of ageing as a principle of difference and practice.

The most prominent issue influencing Turkish-Armenian relations is the international recognition of the Armenian genocide. However, there is a notable absence of empirical analyses regarding the perceptions of the genocide among the Turkish population. This study aims to fill this scholarly gap by exploring, for the first time, the perspectives of Turkish Jews. It analyses evidence collected from interviews conducted with 14 Turkish Jews, utilising Stanley Cohen's (2001) theoretical framework, which aids in delineating significant factors by a categorisation of types of acceptance and denial. The findings highlight a diversity of responses linked to political attitudes, which can be broadly categorised into Kayades and Avlaremoz mindsets. They also show that Turkish Jews' views on the Holocaust influence how they perceive the Armenian genocide. Additionally, the results indicate that Cohen's approach is useful in explaining non-denying responses. In conclusion, the study argues that Turkish Jews' perspectives appear to be strongly related to their stance towards the Turkish state and the Holocaust.

This study investigates structural inequalities in educational enjoyment in a contemporary cohort of United Kingdom (UK) primary school children. Foundational studies in the sociology of education consistently indicate that the enjoyment of education is stratified by social class, gender, and ethnicity. Analysing data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, which is a major cohort study that tracks children born at the start of the 21st century, we examine children's enjoyment of both school and individual academic subject areas. The overarching message is that at age 11 most children enjoy their education. The detailed empirical analyses indicate that educational enjoyment is stratified by gender, and there are small differences between ethnic groups. However, there is no convincing evidence of a social class gradient. These results challenge orthodox sociological views on the relationship between structural inequalities and educational enjoyment, and therefore question the existing theoretical understanding of the wider role of enjoyment in education.

In the UK's stratified HE system the question of who is able to access the most selective and prestigious universities is fraught with issues of fairness. This paper explores how decision-makers in Oxford's undergraduate admissions process construct norms of fairness and how such norms inform their reflexive considerations and actions around admissions decisions. Framing such norms as multiple institutional habituses, the paper considers how decision-makers compromise and negotiate between institutional habituses in tension. Further, it presents an augmented conception of institutional habitus – the relational institutional habitus – which offers a conceptual tool to make sense of the existence of multiple contested institutional norms and their partial and fragile reconciliation in institutional action.

Various branches of the literature suggest that exposure to the high-status appearances and lifestyles of politicians in contemporary “diploma democracies” affects the attitudes and behavior of less-educated citizens because it confronts them with their lower status in the political domain. Informed by this, we theorize that such exposure inspires docility (a lower subjective social status, weaker feelings of political entitlement) and revolt (anger, more support for aggression against government). To investigate this, we conducted an original, pre-registered, video-vignette survey experiment among a representative sample of the Dutch population. While our findings likely generalize to other liberal democracies, the Dutch context is suitable to test our theorizing because low-status and high-status appearances and lifestyles are found across the political arena, irrespective of politicians' substantive positions or use of populist rhetoric. Each less-educated respondent (n = 1390) was presented with a professionally produced video of an actor playing the part of a fictitious politician. This politician signaled either a low or a high status via his appearance and lifestyle. The potentially confounding factors of his substantive positions and populist rhetoric were randomized and controlled for. We find that exposure to the high-status politician increased less-educated citizens' support for aggression against the government. Through exploratory analyses, we assess how the responses of docility and revolt are interrelated, and how they are shaped by less-educated citizens' economic status.

Research about the commercial sex industry rarely examines the women who are the clients purchasing sexual services. Examining how this challenges gender stereotypes through the undoing gender framework reveals how gender norms can be reshaped through contextual changes. Based on 3 years of ethnographic data from a high-end bar in Tianjin, interviews with 27 female clients and 47 MSWs paint a complex picture of how some women adopted ungendered strategies regarding sexuality. As women take control of their own sexual behavior, they free themselves of some traditional societal expectations about their identity. Primarily motivated by pleasure and control, purchasing sex becomes a means for women to experience empowerment and self-confidence by breaking with traditional gender norms and expectations. Undoing gender involves expanding gendered repertoires, with women finding empowerment in adopting a masculine model of sexuality. However, social stigma and personal efficacy indicate that gender deconstruction is a gradual process. The research contributes to understanding complex gender dynamics and sexual behaviors within commercial sex transactions, shedding light on societal norms and individual agency.

How are romantic relationships across class maintained under broader conditions of class inequality? This article draws on in-depth interviews with 38 people who have partnered across class in Australia. It examines the emotional and interpersonal labour required to preserve such relationships within a highly differentiated class structure that is widely obscured in public and political life. We find, first, that for people in committed cross-class relationships where this difference was openly acknowledged, class difference was acutely felt and described in highly emotional, imprecise terms. Second, this heightened awareness of class difference stimulated elevated levels of class friction and class dissonance within these relationships. We detail these experiences, as they were narrated to us, before examining certain interviewees' efforts to understand and resolve these complexities. We highlight the collaborative work undertaken by one couple in particular to navigate feelings of class discomfort and class dissonance. Third, by focussing on the emotional terrain of intimate cross-class negotiations, we stress moments which have the potential to disrupt assumptions about class hierarchies and modes of moral distinction that take place within these relationships. Proceeding to tentatively valorise different forms of value-making and recognition within cross-class relationships, we also pay attention to the role of class in enabling this very capacity for adaptation.

We use data from a large-scale and nationally representative survey to examine whether there is in Britain a trade-off between social diversity and social cohesion. Using six separate measures of social cohesion (generalised trust, volunteering, giving to charity, inter-ethnic friendship, and two neighbourhood cohesion scales) and four measures of social diversity (ethnic fractionalisation, religious fractionalisation, percentage Muslim, and percentage foreign-born), we show that, net of individual covariates, there is a negative association between social diversity and most measures of social cohesion. But these associations largely disappear when neighbourhood deprivation is taken into account. These results are robust to alternative definitions of neighbourhood. We also investigate the possibility that the diversity--cohesion trade-off is found in more segregated neighbourhoods. But we find very little evidence to support that claim. Overall, it is material deprivation, not diversity, that undermines social cohesion.

We present the first comprehensive set of estimates of variation in intergenerational social mobility across regions of Great Britain using data from the UK Labour Force Survey. Unlike the Social Mobility Index produced by the Social Mobility Commission, we focus directly on variation in measures of intergenerational social class mobility between the regions in which individuals were brought up. We define regions using the NUTS classification and we consider three levels, from 11 large NUTS1 regions, to 168 NUTS3 regions, across England, Wales, and Scotland. We investigate whether it is possible to form an index of social mobility from these measures and we address a neglected question: how much does the region in which someone was raised matter in comparison with the social class in which they were raised?