British Journal of Sociology最新文献

In this article we analyse the constructed ‘free speech crisis’ associated with higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK). We examine the media discourses from 2012 to 2022 which led to the establishment of a sense of crisis around speech in universities and, ultimately, to the Freedom of Speech Act in May 2023. We undertake a critical discourse analysis focused on the constructions of universities and university students in two major right-wing broadsheet newspapers, The Times and The Telegraph, and in the right-wing magazine The Spectator. We conceptualise the ‘free speech crisis’ as a discursive formation which is part of broader political efforts of conservative elites to maintain hegemony in Britain. Drawing on populism theory and race critical analyses, we argue that the ‘free speech crisis’ is an expression of racial liberalism and a placeholder for a deeper white anxiety over the social reproduction of elites in university spaces, and thus over (cultural) hegemony in the public sphere. We understand the desire to regulate ‘free’ speech in HE as an effort to prevent the emergence of an elite and (counter)hegemony different to the status quo. We make contributions to two emergent and interrelating bodies of literature: firstly, the study of populism in (post)Brexit Britain, and secondly, the study of culture wars, including iterations of the ‘free speech crisis’ and ‘the war on woke’.

It is well evidenced that South Africa is characterised by extreme socioeconomic inequality, which is strongly racialised. We offer an original sociological perspective, which departs from established perspectives considering the dynamics of vulnerability and poverty to focus on the structuring of classed and racialised privilege. We map how stocks of economic, cultural, and social capital intersect to generate systematic and structural inequalities in the country and consider how far these are associated with fundamental racial divides. To achieve this, we utilise rich, nationally representative data from the National Income Dynamics Study and employ Multiple Correspondence Analysis to construct a model of South African ‘social space’. Our findings underscore how entrenched racial divisions remain within South Africa, with White people being overwhelmingly located in the most privileged positions. However, our cluster analysis also indicates that forms of middle-class privilege percolate beyond a core of the 8% of the population that is white. We emphasise how age divisions are associated with social capital accumulation. Our cluster analysis reveals that trust levels increase with economic and cultural capital levels within younger age groups and could therefore come to intensify social and racial divisions.

No abstract is available for this article.

In Bangladesh, the world's largest refugee settlement currently shelters approximately one million Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar to escape military persecution. Educating a significant number of young Rohingya, roughly half of whom are female, presents a significant challenge. Despite the presence of learning centres (LCs) across refugee camps, Rohingya girls may encounter specific barriers to accessing education due to exposure to various risks, such as violence, child marriage, and trauma stemming from past military oppression. This paper investigates the association between these risk factors and Rohingya girls' likelihood of attending LCs, and how this association may vary across refugee camps. Using survey data and employing three-level multilevel logistic regression models, I find that girls are less likely to attend LCs if they are at risk of encountering sexual abuse, child marriage, and psychological distress or trauma. These factors explain considerable variation in girls' LC attendance between camps and between households. In addition to providing more schooling opportunities to Rohingya children, prioritising girls' safety, protecting them from forced and child marriage, and supporting their psychological well-being require increased policy attention.

Guanxi research would benefit from an empirical description of holistic guanxi network structures and consideration of sociologically meaningful antecedents such as one's cultural value endorsement. This study, inspired by the relational sociology and drawing on the reported trustworthiness of a rich array of referees in one's guanxi network collected from the Traditional Culture and Cognitive Pattern Survey, identifies two types of guanxi network structures in contemporary China: one is featured by the binary distinction between family and non-family referees, and the other displays a fourfold classification scheme, respectively concerning parents, nuclear family members (children and spouse), other relatives and close friends, and acquaintances. Furthermore, traditional culture endorsement is positively correlated with the likelihood of being subject to the binary classification scheme, while some counter social forces, such as the establishment of quasi-kinship relationships, encourage one to lean toward the more fine-grained fourfold guanxi network partitioning.

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.