British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Trust is both a prerequisite and a product of insurance, as insurance contracts are built on and create trust relations that enable a risk-averse perspective towards the future. At the same time, insurer-policyholder relationships are characterised by a persistent distrust, rooted in insurance economics and industry reputation. In this article, we discuss these dynamics through a Luhmannian understanding of (dis)trust as a complexity-reducing functional fiction resulting from social action. Beyond traditional insurance, we examine how trust relations are reconfigured by the introduction of digital technologies and data, developments that could enable new ways to calculate, price and manage risks. We critically assess the claim that these techniques make the future knowable and mitigate-or even eliminate-'the unreliable human factor', ultimately replacing trust relations with a principle of transparency. Drawing on sociology of insurance, critical data studies, and our own case-based research on digital insurance products marketed to individuals, we argue that these technologies do not eliminate uncertainties and vulnerabilities as expected in insurance discourse. Instead, they introduce new insecurities and complexities by increasing the trust relations required for insurance arrangements. Consequently, the principle of transparency offers a narrow, techno-solutionist substitute for trust, ignoring the affective aspects of insurer-policyholder relationships and potentially undermining the social contract and solidarity associated with insurance.

Afropessimism is a critical framework that is often used to analyse anti-Black violence and its deep entrenchment within systems and structures that perpetuate Black subjugation. By conceptualising Black life as ‘non-life’, afropessimism examines how anti-Black violence shapes health disparities, influencing who is deemed worthy of care and underscoring the systemic nature of this (d)evaluation. This framework holds significant potential for anti-racist efforts that aim to address Black health disparities by exposing their root causes. However, afropessimism's central claim—that Black people are not only excluded from the category of the ‘human’ but are also positioned as its antithesis—poses challenges for anti-racist strategies focussed on affirming recognitions of Black humanity to achieve health equity. This paper critically investigates the role of afropessimism in anti-racist health promotion by examining divergent perspectives within its schools of thought. While all scholars who use afropessimist frameworks critically interrogate the systemic inequities that harm Black populations, they differ in their views on the potential for Black life within and beyond current anti-Black systems and structures. These differences lead to varying implications for advancing anti-racist health initiatives and promoting health justice through afropessimism. By analysing how afropessimism may inform anti-racist health frameworks, this paper explores how its distinct theoretical perspectives can enrich, challenge, and constrain efforts to dismantle racial health inequities.

While pubs have long been celebrated as a quintessential part of British culture, the ongoing and increasingly rapid closure of British pubs has raised concerns about the impacts of their loss on the wider cultural life and identity of the nation. The article explores how pub closures are narrated in British print news media through the analysis of a sample of news stories spanning 2000–2023. Time series analysis shows that pub closures have been a steady concern in UK print media, albeit with several notable peaks in coverage aligned to key events impacting the sector. Findings suggest that the causes of pub closure are presented as an economic issue, while the consequences of pub closures are typical framed in social and cultural terms. Using Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’, the article analyses a sub-set of this data to examine how the narratives used to explain pub closures make regular and emotive reference to the nation and associated concepts. Pub closures are therefore presented as a threat to the nation and a loss of national identity. These emotive narratives of loss, we argue, work to homogenise both the idealised pub and the wider national community in a manner which occludes the complexity of both.

Desertion from the military does not turn soldiers into civilians. In this paper, I analyse military identity and embodied practices of soldiers who deserted from the Zimbabwe National Army and were exiled in South Africa. Soldiering is understood as an essence part of who they are, as men who risked their lives and invested in a career, which they later deserted. These soldiers had a particular sense of a military past which functioned at the discursive level: even though they blamed the military for making them leave the barracks, they thought of themselves as soldiers in a context of exile. The men whose narratives are presented in this paper joined the army in post-independence Zimbabwe, and they did not participate in the country's liberation war against the British. These men have a different understanding of themselves as soldiers to those who fought in the liberation war. Their sense of themselves, and others in and outside the military is fundamentally drawn from a professional army. As is often noted, the military is greedy in terms of its demands on its members, and consequently it embeds within military personnel lasting practices, ways of being and a sense of a military identity, all of which can be resistant to change, yet simultaneously resilient, even in a context of exile. I therefore suggest that the experience of civilian life alone does little to erode the practices and mind frames of the military ingrained into army deserters even outside the army. This seems to be the case in a number of African societies where military desertion is prevalent, especially in authoritarian regimes.

There is a variety of conceptions of the public role that sociology ought to play. Perhaps the most common one presents it as serving a critical or oppositional function, not least in relation to governments and their policies. Yet this has by no means always been the dominant conception of sociology's role. In his well-known typology, Michael Burawoy recognised ‘professional’ and ‘policy’ versions of the discipline, alongside ‘critical’ and ‘public’ ones. However, even this does not capture the full range of variation in view about sociology's public role. There can be divergencies within each of Burawoy's categories. And it is worth taking account of these in order to gain a clear sense of all the possibilities. In this spirit, what is offered here is an examination of contrasting approaches that would fall under Burawoy's heading of policy sociology. These come from two key figures who had considerable influence on twentieth-century social and political thought—Karl Mannheim and Karl Popper. While they both believed that the function of social science is to serve government policymaking, and both were committed to democracy, they took very different views about sociology's relationship to governance. Indeed, Popper sharply criticised Mannheim's position, condemning it as totalitarian. The issues these authors addressed remain of considerable significance today, and this paper explores what can be learnt from their differences in perspective, as well as from what they shared.