British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Within the conceptual frame of relational economic sociology, inheritance disputes are a canonical form of relational mismatch. But the social patterning of relational mismatches, and their various ties to inequality, remain murky. In this paper, I examine all known inheritance disputes in Dallas from 1895-1945 within their social context to generate hypotheses about the relationship between inequality and mismatches more broadly. Inheritance disputes were usually resolved by increasing the spread of fortunes; in this sense, they moderated wealth inequality between individuals. But not everyone was equally able to make their preferred estate distribution a reality. Using a series of case studies, I argue that dispute resolutions tended to reify normative family structures and naturalize sharp, moralized distinctions between fuzzy social categories. The legal resolutions to this class of relational mismatches may marginally mitigate individual-level wealth inequality and simultaneously produce categorical inequalities by race, class, gender, sexuality, and family structure. I conclude with a set of hypotheses and questions for future studies.

The link between educational attainment and attitudes towards out-groups stands out as one of the most consistent statistical associations in the social and political sciences. However, a recent analysis of survey data from the United States finds that the relationship between higher education and out-group prejudice depends on the content of education. In this Research Note, we replicate that study's analysis of tertiary-level academic majors within a European context and extend it to include academic specializations below the tertiary level. Our analyses of European Social Survey (ESS) data, spanning 32 countries and over 120,000 respondents, reveal substantial variation in the association between field of study and anti-immigrant prejudice. Specifically, we find that individuals with degrees in arts, humanities, and social sciences express more positive views towards immigrants than those with degrees in other fields. A similar, though less pronounced, pattern emerges among individuals with lower levels of educational attainment. These findings challenge simplistic and politicized notions of the impact of higher education, offering a more nuanced understanding of educational attainment and its so-called “liberalizing effect.”

Although studying elites is a growing strand of scholarship in social sciences, the literature is mostly migration-blind. In this research note, we examine the role of household composition for immigrants' pathways to the elite of the household income distribution in Germany. Distinguishing between native-native, immigrant-native, and immigrant-immigrant households, we investigate the propensity of being in the income elite by household composition and whether education and self-employment, two major pathways into the income elite, differ by household composition. We hypothesize that immigrants in immigrant-native households benefit from their native partner's host-country resources and support. Using data from the German Microcensus from 2009 to 2019 covering around three million observations, we show that immigrant-native households have a higher propensity of belonging to the income elite compared to immigrant-immigrant households. Surprisingly, we find no differences between immigrant-native and native-native households. In addition, we demonstrate that the positive association between education, self-employment and elite membership is stronger for immigrant-native households compared to immigrant-immigrant households. Overall, our research note highlights the importance of the household context for immigrants' access to the income elite.

Whether students educated in different ability tracks in secondary education develop different levels of civic and democratic engagement is yet unclear. To explore this issue, we focus on how schools bring students of different tracks and family backgrounds together, and whether such between-school differences are associated with varying growth rates in civic and democratic engagement during secondary education. Using newly collected 4-year panel data starting at the very beginning of the Dutch tracked educational system, the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (DAPDV), we study developments in institutional trust, societal interest, voting intention, and political knowledge. Growth curve models show that much of the variation between tracks and between schools is rather stable, although track differences in institutional trust became more pronounced. Although schools that are more compositionally diverse vary from homogeneous schools, track differences are largely present already at the start of secondary education. Within-individual transition models show that students moving up to more advanced tracks do gain in political knowledge.

This article contributes to current debates on the ethics of critical scholarship in an era of authoritarian consolidation and institutional erosion. It introduces intellectual solidarity as an ethical stance and reflexive dislocation as a methodological practice that together offer a grounded response to the complicities and constraints of academic life today. Drawing on personal experiences of academic migration-from the Philippines and the United States to Germany and the Netherlands-it explores how authoritarian logics are embedded in institutions often assumed to offer refuge, including the university. These logics manifest through marketisation, surveillance governance, and epistemic austerity. Situated within critical traditions of engaged scholarship, this commentary argues that sustaining sociology's relevance requires more than reflexivity-it demands a commitment to epistemic humility, public accountability, and institutional courage. In calling for a renewed public vocation of the social sciences, it offers intellectual solidarity and reflexive dislocation as provisional tools for thinking, acting, and relating in times of systemic crisis.

This article advances the study of racial extremism by analyzing how its practices of violence and sexuality are marked on the bodies of participants in the form of scars, physical stances, abuse, tattoos, pregnancy, injury, strength and size, using an extraordinarily rich and extensive set of narratives collected from lengthy in-person interviews with 47 former members of U.S. extremist white supremacist groups. It asks how embodied practices of violence and sexuality enable extremist white supremacist groups and actors, how embodied practices of violence and sexuality disable these groups and actors, and how gender matters in embodied practices in these groups. As a lens into embodied practices of violence, interview narratives about participants' preparation and deployment of their bodies in violent situations are analyzed, with attention to the gendered nature of these processes. Similarly, interviewees' narratives about their racialization of sexuality and sexual transactions are analyzed to understand embodied practices of sexuality and their gendered aspects. The embodiment of racist violence is found to be important in making racial extremism a visceral aspect of the lives of its adherents. This is highly gendered, as women and men use and experience violence in different ways. The embodiment of racist sexuality is found to be an iterative process of assessing one's sexuality and the value of one's sexual body to others, a process that serves as a portal to women's victimization while allowing some women to gain access and influence in a highly misogynistic world.

People with higher education hold more positive attitudes towards immigrants than those without. Previous studies have attempted to net out selection mechanisms to examine whether there is a causal effect of higher education on attitudes towards immigrants. However, parental higher education has been largely neglected as a likely source of this selection. Using UKHLS data on individuals and their parents for the UK and employing the khb decomposition model, we examine if and why parental education influences attitudes towards immigrants. First, we show that, net of individual educational attainment, individuals whose parents have a university degree are more likely to have more positive attitudes towards immigrants. More highly educated people have more positive attitudes, but parental education reinforces this association or compensates for low educational attainment. Second, we illustrate that the relationship between parental higher education and attitudes towards immigrants is mediated by two mechanisms: parental socialisation and individual education. In contrast, socio-economic positioning while growing up makes a negligible contribution. Our findings suggest that formative years are crucial for the development of attitudes towards immigrants later in life and that educational inequalities of today affect the attitudes towards immigrants of tomorrow.