British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on ‘earning while learning’ (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experiences have received limited attention and constitute something of a ‘black box’. We open that box by examining the paid work undertaken by full-time students. Through analysis of a national data set, we examine patterns with respect to employment rates, pay, hours, and occupations, as well as how these are gendered. We find a small ‘studentness’ penalty—lower pay for students than non-student workers of the same age. We also find small increases in the proportion currently engaged in paid work. Gender is identified as a key variable in shaping student employment rates, with women considerably more likely than men to work while studying. We find no evidence of a gender pay gap in EwL, but this is largely because most student workers are concentrated in two ‘integrated’ occupations, which we designate as ‘equally bad’ - poorly paid but gender equitable. Older students are more likely to work in gender-segregated occupations, with some indications of male and female gender pay advantages for gender-dominant employment, suggesting a possible early incentive for occupational gender segregation. Given the gender disparity in student work, a core finding is that women disproportionately undertake this poor-quality work. We argue that to address the under-theorisation of EwL, student employment—including its gendering—requires greater attention and should be integrated into conceptualisations of a ‘working-life-course’.

Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper conceives the adoption and development of artificial intelligence by businesses as a strategy within the economic field. Using a survey of over 2000 businesses in the UK and tools of geometric data analysis, I construct a model of the British economic field and project into it indicators of past, present and intended AI adoption. This provides a sense of the correspondences between the structure of the field, the temporal order of strategies, and perceptions of the possible and necessary among its agents. Dominant players within the field have clearly led and will lead the AI ‘revolution’, rendering AI a tool for perpetuating intra-field domination and reproduction, but others below them seem set to pursue emulation strategies to keep up. These conservation strategies may also contain, however, an internal difference between innovation and dependence corresponding with the new and the old within the field.

Recent years witnessed mass migration towards Europe, from Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the 2015 Migrant Crisis linked to war in Syria. This article explores UK government discussion around these two significant crises, focussing on the challenges they present and the portrayal of refugees. It asks how far ministers' language differentiated between Ukrainians and Syrians regarding welfare deservingness. Thematically analysing over 100 official speeches, statements and press releases, the extent of racialisation and welfare chauvinism in ministers' discourse on refugees is revealed. Clear racialisation was found between the two refugee groups, but welfare chauvinism persisted for Ukrainians despite more favourable language, reflecting continued conditionality within UK government discussions of migration phenomena that may hold long-term implications for Ukrainian refugees in the UK.

In the last decade, the “decolonial turn” has gained prominence across academic disciplines, challenging inherent Eurocentric knowledge paradigms. Extending these conversations, this paper critically investigates the notion of “the global” from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial scholars criticize the mainstream conceptualization of cosmopolitanism for its Eurocentrism and advocate for alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. This paper builds on this decolonial scholarship and examines how various local actors make sense of and give meaning to the contested category of “the global” in understanding, articulating, and addressing their visions for social change. Drawing from ethnographic research on queer activism in South Korea, it identifies the coexistence and contestation between two forms of cosmopolitanism—metrocentric and provincial—and suggests that we understand non-Western activists as producers of anticolonial thought from below. By doing so, this paper contributes to critical scholarship on globalization, cosmopolitanism, and decolonial thought.

In 2023, China introduced regulatory amendments to birth certificates and the hukou (household registration) system, aiming to boost birth rates and offset an aging population. However, the implications of these changes on marriage and family support amidst population policy shifts remain underexplored. One particular area is how commercial surrogacy (CS) impacts gay communities where couples seek surrogate children to maintain intergenerational bonding and bridging within their familial and kinship networks. This article employs Bourdieu's field theory, characterized by class-based capital and habitus, to examine how upper-class gay individuals navigate this changing field in the three municipal cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 35 upper-class gay fathers and 21 gays' parents, their agency and changes in pursuing parenthood through transnational and underground CS in China are illustrated. This article posits that the formation of the family is inherently tied to the class-based cultural capital and habitus of the gay individuals. The reproductive decision-making process within the gay community reflect strategies to form families are imbued with class-based capital and habitus.

How do free spaces become radicalizing spaces? Studies of far-right radicalism have highlighted the role of insulated movement spaces in radicalizing their members. In these spaces, participants can flaunt their radical ideas and infuse them into everyday practices, forming these ideas into comprehensive and resilient worldviews. However, the salience of radical ideas in free spaces has also been found to be inconsistent and rare. This contrast makes it unclear when and how exactly free spaces contribute to the spread and persistence of radical ideas. Drawing on a 4-year ethnographic study of a radical right-wing libertarian movement in the US, this study shows how activists both highlight and downplay radical ideas creatively to solve situationally emergent challenges of coordinating action. Thus, while the movement's free spaces created circumstances that imbued some everyday mundane practices with radical political significance, they also facilitated an opposite process: they created conditions that obscured or even undermined the political meaning of otherwise radical practices. As I argue, rather than stifling the spread of radical ideas, this banalization of radical practices is a critical component of the radicalization process itself, allowing activists to coordinate radical action among a diverse group of people and across varying situations. In this way, free spaces contribute to the coordination of radical action, even among participants who do not necessarily express radical political motivations. Thus, the findings show how people's motivations for radical action are often articulated in the moment, in response to specific situations and the challenges they present.

The research published in François Ewald's magisterial L'État providence (1986) has been a major source of inspiration for sociological work on insurance for nearly 40 decades. This is impressive given that only a tiny part of that research was known in the Anglophone world until recently, through a few separately translated articles. In this paper, I study how Ewald paints a bigger picture of the insurantial society in the book. First, I examine how L'État providence weaves together histories of responsibility, risk, solidarity and insurance that together made possible the emergence of the French welfare state at the dawn of the twentieth century; simultaneously, the book describes how the concept of the 'social' could become an effective element in the practices of law and government. Second, I enquire into how Ewald combines a philosophical interest with empirical work on the insurantial society. I look at four aspects of Ewald's approach: its site specificity, its reliance on empirical description, the way it does conceptual work and its manner of addressing ontological questions. The point is to explicate the theoretical sensibility that is immanent in Ewald's own scholarly ascesis and that has enabled him to paint the bigger picture provided by L'État providence.

Although cocaine use is rising among youth in many countries, little is known about the social context and its influence on this new pattern of use. Drawing on a theoretical framework of class, gender, and peer-status dynamics and extensive data from personal interviews, we investigate how cocaine use is culturally situated and socially organised in certain Norwegian high school cultures. The focal sample consists of study participants who stated that they had used cocaine. They totalled 32 persons, of whom 28 were boys. We identify four key cultural characteristics linked to cocaine use: (i) affluence: users often had backgrounds rich in economic capital; (ii) a party-centred culture: cocaine was introduced in contexts with excessive partying and binge drinking; (iii) top-level networks: cocaine use was linked to exclusive social networks, based in Norwegian high school graduation celebrations; and (iv) masculinity: boys used more cocaine than girls, to boost their energy and self-confidence. We conclude that the key driver of cocaine use is a structurally determined socialisation pattern, which we theorise as a ‘top-boy’ culture. This culture is anchored in status-seeking elite school milieus characterised by affluence, heavy partying, and exclusive homosocial networks. Boys invested in this culture may engage in cocaine use to signal membership and to mimic the hallmark of ‘ease’, in accordance with a rather orthodox type of masculinity. Whereas youth cultures often represent pockets of resistance to traditional hierarchies, this culture instead seems to strengthen such established hierarchical arrangements.