Sociology

By curtailing workplace socialisation, platform-mediated gig work hinders the development of affective relationships necessary for the experience of recognition. However, extant research into recognition at work has typically only focused on face-to-face interactions, overlooking technologically complex forms of work where recognition might be sought from and via technical intermediaries. Advancing sociological research into the lived experience of contemporary gig workers, this article draws on 41 interviews with Foodora riders in Norway and Sweden to explore how gig workers solicit and experience recognition at work. I identify a process of anthropotropism, whereby gig workers turn to human connections where possible in an attempt to pursue traditional social scripts of collegiality and to gain recognition from legitimate human sources. Further, I identify how platform-mediated communication does not prohibit recognition, but intermittent automation and neoliberal modes of instrumentalising recognition can disrupt the development of individual subjectivities and lead to feelings of mechanistic dehumanisation.

This article explores the experiences of white, male manual workers in Hastings, East Sussex – a mid-sized UK seaside town that has undergone long-term decline in employment opportunities. Informed by the theoretical insights from Bourdieu, it focuses on the role of place in shaping the employment paths of a group that has arguably been ‘left behind’ by local and global forces. Drawing on broader notions of place as landscape and highlighting the significance of ‘immobility and dependence’, ‘competitive localism and belonging’ and ‘bounded potential’, it examines how landscape conditions are implicated in the meanings given to work experiences, perceived employment opportunities and future aspirations. We argue that incorporating landscape into Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice extends our understanding of landscape’s influence on employment experiences and its unique capacities as both a physical and a socially constructed entity.

This article extends existing sociological scholarship on doing and displaying family by developing the concept of documenting families. We suggest that documenting is conceptually rich insofar as it showcases the relationship, and tensions, between institutional practices and individual experiences of family display. Drawing on our research with men who became parents without partners, we argue that the process of documenting family is made especially evident in studies of what Finch originally referred to as ‘non-conventional’ family relationships. We explain that documenting sheds light not only on the official and unofficial means through which families are recognised on paper, but also on family practices as work – in this case paper-work – that involves negotiation between different social actors who are generally unequal in terms of their authority and agency to impose situational meaning.

This article explores the relationship between migrant mothers and welfare workers in domestic space to argue the home is a site where the boundary between formal, social and affective aspects of citizenship is remade. Drawing on 14 months’ ethnography with migrant mothers, this article attends to state encounters in new migrants’ homes revealing how migration and welfare policy changes are reconfiguring their most intimate spaces. Mothers who can prove they are ‘appropriate’ subjects of care (through their mothering practices) are deemed ‘deserving’ objects of state care (and worthy of a form of citizenship and belonging). The deep gendered, raced and classed inflections of ‘deservingness’ and assumptions based on these norms are co-constituted by space and embedded social relations between mothers and welfare workers shaping possibilities of migrant mothers’ citizenship practices.

This ethnographic study draws on the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu to illustrate the production and reproduction of disability through the social practices of high performance disability sport. We illustrate how, through the pedagogic action of the coaches, disability was continually inscribed in the habitus of the athletes through a focus on structure and routine. As such, social differentiation was ever-present as a way of ordering the social space of coaching. The coaching process comprised a number of mechanisms for the exchange of cultural capital and the accumulation of social competencies through a focus on lifestyle and behaviour change. Together, these practices closely resembled the workings of symbolic violence, in particular its social reproduction of cultural reproduction function. By outlining how the socialising conditions of major institutions can naturalise systems of social differentiation, this article brings together and extends sociological theorising of the disabled body through engagement with disability sport.

Cycling is an environmentally sustainable social practice that contributes to liveable cities and provides affordable and healthy transport. People with lower education could particularly benefit from cycling, as they tend to fare worse regarding finances and health. However, in bivariate analyses, those with lower education cycle less. This article discusses the social meaning of cycling and investigates whether the education–cycling association holds after accounting for (1) confounders and (2) factors that determine decision leeway between different transport modes. I analyse approximately 80,000 short-distance trips (0.5–7.5 km) reported by 28,000 working-age individuals from cities in Germany using multilevel linear probability regression models. Results support that higher education systematically and substantially increases the propensity to cycle. This education gap implies major untapped potential for environmental sustainability, that current pro-cycling policies in cities disproportionally favour the highly educated and that cycling patterns contribute to inequalities in finances and health.

The post-colonial debate challenges the self-certainty of sociology and the suggested universality of its theoretical premises. This has led to calls to provincialize sociological theories and concepts and include perspectives from the South. Thus, we need to ask whether sociological concepts apply globally. Burawoy’s notion of a professional ‘global sociology’ offers a starting point for provincializing sociological concepts without giving up their global applicability. The problems involved in applying the core sociological category of class to Kenya show that classical sociological concepts may be inadequate for analysing societies outside the European and North American context. For the analysis of inequality, we need a more open and empirically founded concept in which the classical notion of class describes just a particular pattern of social structure. For the development of sociological concepts, we always require a broad empirical and intercultural basis in order not to be caught in the trap of Eurocentrism.

Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework offers a productive means of making sense of statistical regularities and correspondences. When it comes to explaining the intricacies of individual biographies, however, including something as seemingly personal as one’s choice of occupation, Bourdieu offers only a starting point in need of elaboration. Above all, there is a need to pay greater attention to the multiplicity of fields in which individuals are situated and the interplay between them in shaping desires and strategies. These include class, family relations and, in some cases, employment-based fields such as art, religion or specific organisations. To demonstrate the argument, this article takes as a case study the trajectory of Vincent van Gogh, highlighting the ongoing interaction between class, family and other fields in generating his eventual decision to become an artist.

Lying is typically considered as a morally salient phenomenon in existing research. In this article we seek to expand the understanding of lying and deception as socially situated phenomena. We draw on qualitative interview data from a larger project on everyday experiences of living with dementia and examine how carers of people living with dementia describe, explain and justify care practices that involve the use of untruth in some way. We find that carers frequently refer to a problem with their temporal landscapes. Weaving this into moral accounts of lying, we argue for recognising the importance of our orientation in time (to the past, the present and the future) for how lying and deception are made sense of in everyday life.

Building on previous work about cultural informalisation and the growing urban–rural divide in western democracies, this article studies symbolic boundary work as performed by white youths living in rural areas in the Netherlands. We conducted a micro-sociological analysis of how these youths celebrate regional festivals in the Netherlands, and particularly the meanings they attach to their affective displays of intoxication and sexuality. We show how distinction is ‘done’ here by many of these youths taking pride in drinking too much beer, sexual directness and impropriety, which they argue are expressions of conviviality and down-to-earthness. In doing so, they appear to be finding dignity and redemption in an image of themselves as savages and reappropriating it as part of their own ‘civility’, contrasting their revelry with what they perceive to be urban, middle-class snobbery.

Colourism – skin shade prejudice – is a social justice issue for People of Colour globally. Yet, there has been no major sociological study that explores colourism in the UK. Addressing this gap, we draw on nine in-depth qualitative interviews with Black and Mixed-Race heterosexual men living in England that formed part of a larger study of colourism. Using reflexive thematic analysis through an intersectional feminist lens, we argue that colourism is gendered. We found that Black men both experience colourism and perpetuate it by teasing male peers and favouring women with light skin. Our analysis generated three themes: (1) navigating colourism as part of growing up; (2) skin shade paradoxes for Black and Mixed-Race men; and (3) colourism and desirability through the Black male gaze. This research provides a nuanced exploration of colourism from Black and Mixed-Race men’s perspectives. It underscores the significance of colourism in the UK.

Educational gradients in parental leave length are opposite for women and men: highly educated women return to work faster than those with low education while highly educated men are absent longer than less educated men. Explanations for the opposite gradients are typically made at the individual- or couple-level. To date, no quantitative study has documented whether the opposite educational gradients hold also within workplaces. In this study, we use employer–employee matched Swedish register data with fixed-effects models to examine whether the educational gradient applies also among co-workers in the same workplace. The results show that three-quarters of the educational effect typically attributed to the individual father disappeared when comparing fathers within workplaces. The educational gradient of mothers remained largely unchanged. These findings provide the first population-level evidence for the primacy of the workplace in determining fathers’ care choices.