Sociology

This article uses an analysis of social studies of finance to explore Andrew Abbott’s ideas about how we construct ‘new’ social theory. Drawing on Abbott, it is argued that social studies of finance tend as much towards the recycling of existing conjecture as the presentation of markedly novel argument. Yet Abbott’s position also questions such potential critique by suggesting that theoretical recycling and recombination represent ‘normal’, and often creative, academic behaviour.

This article contains the first systematic analysis of the undergraduate sociology methods course syllabuses collected by John Peel in the late 1960s and John Wakeford in the late 1970s. It outlines the major trends in methods teaching in the late 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the teaching of quantitative methods in this period. But the broader aim of the analysis is to explain how the debates surrounding the rise of feminist sociology and the critiques of ‘positivism’ in the 1960s and 1970s affected methods teaching in British sociology. The article argues that despite their limited influence on the contents of the methods curriculum, these debates had another, more subtle but pervasive, impact on how methods were perceived in the sociology community and which methods could be justifiably seen as important and which as irrelevant.

This article advances understanding of the structural and agentic factors which influence how migrants in low-paid work reflexively acquire the dominant language of destination countries. Bourdieu’s theories on the symbolic power of language and habitus, and theories of reflexivity by Archer and others underpin our analysis of how migrants acquire English in the UK. Analysis of data generated from in-depth qualitative interviews with 31 migrants from EU and non-EU countries in low-paid work reveals that the agency of migrants in increasing proficiency in the language is shaped by access to resources, conscious and unconscious reflexive processes, aspects of embodiment and perceptions of identity by the self and others. We argue that closer attention to the social, political and economic context in which migrants acquire the dominant language of destination countries is needed, as well as greater awareness of the multi-dimensional nature of reflexivity and the constraints on agency.

The symbolic categorisation of social groups has become prominent in studies of social class. This article addresses a tension in this research regarding the relationship between different symbolic categories. We argue that the potential of moral categorisations to change or oppose the order of socioeconomic or cultural categorisations depends on whether moral categories are subordinate in a hierarchy or co-exist in a heterarchy of multiple symbolic categories. We explore the relationship between cultural, socioeconomic and moral categorisations by combining focus group and survey data among Danish citizens in a mixed-methods research design. Our study shows that moral categorisations are opposed but also subordinated to socioeconomic categorisations. Such categorisations therefore serve to legitimise rather than transform class inequality. This has important implications for understanding class relations in modern societies as well as for the study of symbolic categorisations, and it highlights the importance of studying the interrelationship between multiple symbolic categories.

Questions of political conflict have always been central to class analysis; changing political fault lines were a key argument in the debates about the ‘death of class’. The ensuing ‘cultural turn’ in class analysis has shown how class continues to shape lives and experience, though often in new ways. In this article, we bring this mode of analysis to the political domain by unpacking how a multidimensional concept of class – based on the ideas of Bourdieu – can help make sense of contemporary political divisions. We demonstrate that there is a homological relation between the social space and the political space: pronounced political divisions between ‘old’ politics related to economic issues and ‘new’ politics related to ‘post-material values’ follow the volume and composition of capital. Importantly, the left/right divide seems more clearly related to the divide between cultural and economic capital than to the class hierarchy itself.

In this study, situated in urban Stockholm, communal housing stands out as highly individualized. The residents positively appraise their way of living, not primarily for values related to collective solidarity, but for enabling autonomy, privacy and easy exits. Rather than theorizing this as a contradiction, communal housing is framed as a case of individualized collectivism, a belonging structure that is evaluated for fostering interpersonal relations with a high degree of independency. The article discusses the notion of Swedish state individualism as an explanatory backdrop and argues that it is the existence of a collective frame – in the shape of a historically embedded welfare program and an everyday housing platform – that enables the residents to sustain their individualized lives. Through an analysis of the residents’ negotiations around self and solidarity, autonomy and dependency, communal housing unfolds as an everyday response to a widespread tension between individualized societies and people’s search for community.

This article explores the relationship between occupational community and restructuring at a UK steelworks. Through historic and contemporary experiences, restructuring has become an internalized feature of the steelworker identity. Zittoun and Gillespie’s framework of proximal and distal experiences is adapted to analyse the internalization process. The article argues that experiential resources associated with restructuring are transmitted via the occupational community, forming a part of a collective memory of workplace change. These experiences relate to the historical precedence of restructuring, the role of trade unions in accepting the inevitability of downsizing and prior personal and vicarious experiences of redundancy. The findings build on debates around the determinants of an occupational community, highlighting the role of ‘marginality’ and how experiences of restructuring bind steelworkers to a broader community of fate.

This article investigates the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour within the remote gig economy. We use interview and survey data to highlight how platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are normatively disembedded from social protections through a process of commodification. Normative disembeddedness leaves workers exposed to the vagaries of the external labour market due to an absence of labour regulations and rights. It also endangers social reproduction by limiting access to healthcare and requiring workers to engage in significant unpaid ‘work-for-labour’. However, we show that these workers are also simultaneously embedded within interpersonal networks of trust, which enable the work to be completed despite the low-trust nature of the gig economy. In bringing together the concepts of normative and network embeddedness, we reconnect the two sides of Polanyi’s thinking and demonstrate the value of an integrated understanding of Polanyi’s approach to embeddedness for understanding contemporary economic transformations.

Neo-artisanal production is a growing milieu of contemporary urban cultural economy. This article positions one area of this neo-artisanship – ‘craft’ beer brewing – as pivotal to this urban milieu. It draws on 25 qualitative interviews with craft brewers and brewery owners in London and critically unpacks how the ‘crafting’ of beer involves entanglements with and alterations of social and material space. The article offers accounts of London craft brewery owners’ creative and commercial dispositions and the spatial and aesthetic patterns emerging out of London’s craft beer boom and troubles the weaving of craft brewing by policymakers and real estate developers into restructuring and place-making agendas. The article suggests that the ‘authentication’ of livelihoods, tastes and places through the tactile promise of ‘craft’ cannot be decoupled from patterns of socio-spatial stratification and growing precarity and casts doubt upon any ‘creative’ urban economy shifting in this direction.

Many studies invoke the concept of the Bourdieusian habitus to account for a plethora of stratified patterns uncovered by conventional social-scientific methods. However, as a stratum-specific, embodied and largely non-declarative set of dispositions, the role of the habitus in those stratified patterns is typically not adequately scrutinised empirically. Instead, the habitus is often attributed theoretically to an empirically established link between stratification indicators and an outcome of interest. In this research note, we argue that combining conventional methods in stratification research with latency-based measures such as the Implicit Association Test enables better measurement of the habitus. This sociological application of Implicit Association Tests enables researchers to: (1) identify empirically the existence of different habitus among different social strata; and (2) determine their role in the stratified patterns to which they have thus far been attributed theoretically.