Sociology

This piece responds to the Benchmarking Review of UK Sociology’s assertion that the discipline has a deficit in quantitative methods and that the solution involves a recognition that: ‘… statistical methods form the core of social science.’ It argues that whilst a quantitative programme is essential and we can agree that there are problems in relation to the quantitative competencies of sociologists at all levels in the UK, a turn to conventional statistical methods is not the way to go. The argument is developed first in relation to epistemic critiques of those methods by Pawson and Goldthorpe and then by the outlining of an alternative founded in a synthesis of complexity and systematic comparison. The key issue is that we need a quantitative programme which actually corresponds to social reality and that is not to be found in statistical methods which reify variables and consider causality in linear terms.

In recent years, academics have shown interest in the phenomenon of intensive parenting, which has predominantly focused on mothers as primary caregivers. In this article we seek to move beyond approaches which invoke a maternal lens in order to consider fathers’ experience of intensive parenting in relation to their lives with partners. Drawing on data from a qualitative longitudinal study of men over the transition to fatherhood we explore men’s experiences of the benefits and challenges of an intensive parenting approach. Despite increased involvement in childcare, men appear to be relatively insulated against the demands of intensive parenting, describing the importance of autonomous decision-making over following expert advice. However, this article considers the way in which other aspects of contemporary parenting may be experienced more intensively by men, pointing to gender differentiation in risks related to a moral parenthood identity.

This article offers a sociological analysis of household food waste and its starting point is a critique of perspectives in which volumes of waste generation are used to infer the presence of a throwaway society. Drawing on broadly ethnographic examples, the analysis illustrates some of the ways in which the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’ arises as a consequence of the ways in which domestic practices are socially and materially organized. Specifically, attention is paid to: 1) routines of household food provisioning and the contingencies of everyday life; 2) the social relations manifest in the enduring convention of the family meal and; 3) the socio-temporal context of food practices. Taken together it is suggested that contemporary sociological approaches to home consumption, material culture and everyday life can usefully engage with public and policy concerns about the origins and consequences of food waste.

Based on in-depth interviews with 24 working couples who hire domestic helpers in Hong Kong, this article examines the hiring of help as an instance of unequal social exchange in which mothers are expected to give up more than fathers. Men view hiring help as a contractual service and as a ‘gift’ to their wives that allows them to ‘buy out’ of housework and childcare. Women, however, are likely to supplement their helper’s contributions with their own labour since they view hired help as ‘less-than-optimal’ childcare. They also feel responsible for the supervision and emotional needs of their helpers by treating them as ‘part of the family’. By examining the gendered meanings attached to paid domestic help, we show how men and women reproduce the traditional division of labour in the home when hiring domestic helpers, rather than relieving the tensions that working mothers face between paid employment and childcare.

This article highlights the paradoxical coping strategies employed by low-income families. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 families in the UK, it is demonstrated that individuals initiate strategies to avoid the social effects of stigmatization and alleviate threats to social identity. In particular, families engage in conspicuous consumption, with emphasis on ensuring children have access to the ‘right’ brands. This can be interpreted in two opposing ways. Low-income consumers, in particular single mothers, may be understood as coping within the challenging context of consumer culture to improve the standard of living for their families. However, drawing on underclass discourse surrounding ‘chav’ culture and single mothers, it is demonstrated that the coping strategies employed to achieve approval in fact fuel further stigmatization and instead of creating inclusion have the opposite outcome of exclusion and marginalization.

If secularization is increasing over time, this should be observable in patterns of religiosity across the generations. The Home Office Citizenship Survey (of adults in England and Wales) and its accompanying Young People’s Survey provide a relatively rare example of individual-level and intergenerational British data on religious transmission, with indications of religious affiliation or practice across three generations. Secondary analysis was conducted on the 2003 data, looking at religious transmission in four groups: Christians, Muslims, those from non-Christian non-Muslim religions and those with no religion. Associations between religious transmission and a range of social factors are presented, with these including ethnicity, gender, country of birth and socio-economic characteristics. The data suggest a complex pattern of religious transmission over the three generations and a higher transmission of Islam than any of the other religious categories. There is, therefore, a focus on Islam in the presentation and discussion of the data analysis.

Our dependence on energy from fossil fuels is causing potentially disastrous global warming and posing fundamental questions about the commensurability of consumer capitalism and a sustainable society. UK and Scottish governments have taken a lead in climate change legislation intended to avoid worst-case scenarios through low carbon transition. There are, however, considerable uncertainties about whether individualized, market-driven, materialistic societies can manage such radical transformations. Policies to cut household emissions focus on behaviour change through social marketing and incremental modifications to consumption. This technocratic model produces very little societal change, and seems likely to be self-defeating. The framing of the problem as one of behavioural adjustments to individual self-interest obscures alternative understandings of society as a collective accomplishment. Through simultaneous ‘knowing and not knowing’ about unsustainable consumerism, a behavioural model allows governing to proceed, while marginalizing awkward questions about the contradictions between economic growth and low carbon transitions.

This article employs a practice–theoretical approach in order to explore how preferences towards Fairtrade goods emerge and are sustained through engagement in varied social practices. In recent years, the rates of Fairtrade consumption have been growing steadily both within the UK and globally and this growth has been widely represented as the result of thousands of individual citizen-consumers ‘voting’ for fairer trade. This article moves away from current accounts of (Fairtrade) consumption that rely on models of conscious and expressive consumer choice and instead demonstrates how consumption is shaped by shared structures of knowledge, institutional frameworks and infrastructures of provision. In so doing, attention is drawn to the wider practice of Fairtrade support which is collectively constituted by agents from diverse social backgrounds and in which consuming Fairtrade goods forms only one part of what is means to be a ‘Fairtrade supporter’.

This article examines the figure of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’ or ‘Cub’ in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that ‘Bogan’, like that of ‘Chav’ in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, ‘Cubs’ have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub’s emergence, is linked to Australia’s resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to participate in consumption. We argue that access to economic capital has provided the Cub with mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption and anxiety to middle-class hegemony. As a result, the middle class has redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries, whereby, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark Cubs as ‘other’ to the middle-class deservingness, taste and morality.