Critical Sociology

There has been a recent revival of interest in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Within this revival, some scholars have focused upon the question of the sources of Gramsci’s theory, particularly with reference to linguistic sources; others have focused upon applications of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, particularly in conjunction with the question of the subaltern. This article seeks to contribute to this revival by nuancing three aspects of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Firstly, Croce’s presumed influence over the latter is rejected in favor of a commonality of concerns with a whole generation of Italian intellectuals, not just Croce. Secondly, it is emphasized that philosophy played an important role in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony in that it provided the all-important critiques of common sense and false consciousness. Lastly, it is argued that the intellectuals’ need for a new hegemony was not just organic but included traditional intellectuals in complex new formations.

In this article the concept of immaterial labor is dialectically related to the cycle of material labor in the production and reproduction of capital and bourgeois society. The article reflects on how this affects the dynamics of social classes and their struggles in contemporary capitalist society. Immaterial labor, like its manual counterpart, is also subject to capitalism’s essential contradictions as well as its processes and tendencies. Various authors, including Latin American Marxists, are drawn upon to explore further this historical process.

Megaspectacles are theorized as markets for a special economic object: trophies of surplus enjoyment. Attendees at megaspectacles were found to focus their activity upon trophy markets, trophy hunting and anticipated trophy display rather than spontaneous enjoyment of the staged event. Veblen’s theory of trophies as invidious objects, and insights from Goffman, Lacan and Žižek, are used to explain these counterintuitive findings. Trophies function as distorting mirrors, reflective surfaces in which viewers misrecognize the trophy owner’s apparent experience of legendary pleasures as their own dispossessed surplus enjoyment. Megaspectacles produce and sustain envy inducing legends and ritually load trophies with three forms of potential envy: status trophies (envy of symbolic prowess), action trophies (envy of imaginary risk taking) and trophies of jouissance (envious yet repressed desire for libidinal pleasure). Megaspectacles do not directly pleasure their attendees, but provide them with trophies of surplus enjoyment to disturb and disrupt the pleasure of others.

Although tenant evictions are routine in impoverished urban communities throughout the USA, scholars of housing and urban poverty have consistently overlooked this social problem. Drawing predominantly upon participant observation on eviction crews in Baltimore, this study examines the social drama of eviction, focusing upon the orchestration and execution of the court-ordered physical removal of tenants and their property. I find that property managers delegate the ‘dirty work’ of dispossession to a dispossessed population and that laborers on eviction crews tend to differentiate and distance themselves from the people they are evicting, adopting the dominant belief that eviction is rooted in the individual, moral deficiencies of the tenant. These findings reveal that those who are excluded from the American ‘paradigm of propertied citizenship’ – the homeless – are used to enforce, and serve to legitimate, that very paradigm. I argue that evictions entail a circle of dispossession, reproduced both materially and ideologically.

Since James Scott introduced the concept of ‘everyday resistance’ in 1985, research has grown within partly overlapping fields. Existing studies utilize very different definitions, methodologies and understandings of ‘everyday resistance’, which makes a systematic development of the field difficult. In previous work, the authors have suggested a theoretical and definitional framework where everyday resistance is understood as a specific kind of resistance that is done routinely yet is not publicly articulated with political claims or formally organized. A more comprehensive and systematic exploration of this challenging phenomenon is possible through an analysis where: repertoires of everyday resistance are taken into account, together with relations between actors, as well as the spatialization and temporalization of resistance. These analytical dimensions are explained and motivated through illustrations from existing research. Finally, it is argued all four dimensions need to be studied in intersections.

This article asks whether volunteering by refugees and asylum seekers holds potential to foster collective resistance to the British state’s increasingly punitive asylum policies. It draws on research that included four organizational case studies and in-depth qualitative interviews with refugees and asylum seekers volunteering in a city in Northern England, and analyses this data using inter-related concepts of contradiction, hegemony and social capital. This research found that volunteering by refugees and asylum seekers had potential to contribute to cohesive social blocs that might form a basis for resistance, yet also exhibited tendencies to divide refugees and encourage individualized forms of action, which reinforced a subordinate position for the majority. The article concludes that realizing the potential of voluntary activity as a basis for collective resistance to the state’s asylum policies may require it to be combined with political education and organization.

Following the decline of ethnic notions of national identity, the extent to which immigrants are believed to have acceptably liberal values has become a site of boundary making in Western Europe. Much scholarly work has focused on ‘boundary liberalism’ in European media/policy discourse, and the ways that Muslim migrants in particular are framed as carriers of unacceptable ideologies. There has, however, been little exploration of how these ideas shape practice in the mandatory citizenship training that is an increasingly common feature of European integration regimes. This article examines boundary liberalism in citizenship education as it took place in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Attention is paid to how instructors interpret the mandate to enforce tolerance in others in light of Germany’s own problematic history, how curricula and classroom interactions define normative liberalism, and how lessons on these values still draw the symbolic boundaries of national and supranational identities to exclude Muslims.