The Sociological Review

This article considers the relationships between consumption, the environment, and wider sociological endeavour. The current vogue for applying theories of practice to the policy domain of ‘sustainable consumption’ has been generative of conceptual renewal, however the field now sits closer to the applied environmental social sciences than to the sociology of consumption. The analysis proceeds via a close reading of the intellectual currents that have given rise to this situation, and it identifies a number of interrelated issues concerning conceptual slippage and the exclusion of core disciplinary concerns. Accordingly a more suitable definition of consumption is offered, an agenda for re-engaging with foundational approaches to consumer culture is established, and a renewal and reorientation of critique is proposed. Working through and building on the contributions of practice theoretical repertoires, this article suggests that consumption scholarship offers a distinctive set of resources to discussions of current ecological crises and uncertain social futures. These are briefly described and the conclusion argues that consumption still matters.

This article contributes to the unresolved concern about the relationship between habitus and reflexivity. Using Sri Lanka, a postcolonial social context, as the research ground, the article provides a contemporary interpretation of individuals’ reflexive and habitual behaviour that displaces Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as inappropriate for the representation of 21st-century social dynamics. While Sri Lanka is often labelled a traditional society, where habitual, routine, pre-reflexive action is thought to be more common, studies that question this generalised view appear to be largely absent. Therefore, based on a critical realist morphogenetic perspective that offers the analytical possibility of both routine and conscious action, this article investigates the role of habitus and reflexivity through 75 work and life histories gathered from Sri Lanka. The findings suggest that even the reproduction of traditional practices has increasingly become a reflexive task; thus, this work supports the position that habitus fails to provide reliable guidance to understand social action, even within a society labelled as traditional.

The standard narrative of the emergence, rise and decline of Silicon Valley companies focuses on the evolution of institutions and technological waves, not the mentality of the innovators and entrepreneurs. This article argues that this type of explanation of the rise and decline of the Silicon Valley firms and institutions can hardly be sufficient. The suggestion is that a neo-Khaldunian theory could shed light on the issue. This article is an attempt to, first, distinguish between the medieval and modern aspects of Ibn Khaldun’s theory and second, to use the latter to examine Silicon Valley as a social phenomenon. It will be argued that Ibn Khaldun’s theory is of most contemporary relevance when we read it as a general account of a cyclical replacement of the untrained with the trained, while over and above the specific, environmentally deterministic cycle he identifies between ‘city-dwellers’ and ‘Bedouins’. In the case of Silicon Valley, these could be read as metaphors for, respectively, the established tech firms versus the garage-based start-up ‘geeks’.

This article proposes the social sciences consider texture – rather than text − as the important legacy of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences. The article considers texture in the literal sense of surface-patterns, as well as texture as a metaphor for the ‘dynamic’ and hard-to-capture qualities of social life. The article draws on the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies and recent developments in geography and cultural research to map out different textural frameworks. While sociologists have lagged behind their counterparts in other fields in embracing a textural sensibility, the article considers the writings of Georg Simmel and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology as prominent exceptions to that rule. The article concludes by encouraging sociologists to consider the textural as a way into a ‘theoretical’ – as against a purely ‘methodological’ conception – of the qualitative.

Norbert Elias and John Scotson’s analysis of the interconnection between positive and negative community identities in The Established and the Outsiders is well-known. Elias’s subsequent writing about community offers a more rounded analysis, going beyond established/outsider configurations by exploring community’s gendered character and the forces involved in the ‘we–I balance’ that counteract the pervasive process of individualization. Elias’s use of personal pronouns to reveal how community identity (‘we’) relates not only to outsiders (‘they’) but also to an individual member (‘I’) of communities is central to his extended theory of community.

The need for social as well as academic impact in social science research is now well established. Art is increasingly being explored as a means of generating social impact, most commonly as a way to engage publics with research findings, but to date with little exploration of the process of engagement itself. In this study, we set out to explore the power of art to engage the public. We do this by examining the ‘affective’ experience of engagement through a qualitative investigation using one-to-one interviews and a modified visual matrix exercise. In this article we report on the findings from our analysis of the affective experience of watching a film series, and through this discuss the use of film to communicate research findings and value of a novel qualitative psychosocial methodology for exploring the process of public engagement.

This article presents the findings of research regarding the transformation of the meaning of ex-detention and extermination sites in Chile. In the context of the increasing cost of land and the ‘urban cleansing’ associated with global processes of neoliberalization, the author reflects in particular upon the dynamics of visibility and erasure that accompany the life of these recent ruins, and the various politics of their memorialization. From a critical phenomenological perspective the author argues that ruins of sites of violence have the capacity to interrupt, transgress and even contradict narratives about them; furthermore, the relation between affect, ethics and aesthetics is discussed so as to raise questions about the possibility of witnessing and the challenges of memorialization.

This article develops theories of collective memory by attending to the everyday practices and meaning-making involved in creating and sustaining sites of heritage. While research across disciplines linked to memory studies has increased in recent years, with a notable sociological contribution, as yet ethnographic understandings of how collective memory is produced and maintained through locally situated and embedded practices are not fully realized. Our research took place in the village of Six Bells in the South Wales Valleys, where living memory of a coal mining disaster in 1960 and coal mining itself are slowly disappearing. One of ways in which the people of Six Bells are remembering and commemorating this past is by giving their narratives and artefacts to the community’s ‘heritage room’ as gifts. This form of remembering, prompted by an extraordinary event and the rapid social change associated with deindustrialization, produces and sustains legitimate representations and imaginaries of the past. By developing anthropological understandings of gift exchange, we propose that these practices are one visible component of the claims to authenticity and the bestowal of value active in the memory work of everyday life. We attend to three interrelated characteristics of gift exchange to develop our argument; the importance of the personal in producing authenticity through the gift relation; the provenance and social impetus of the act of giving; and the systems of reciprocity generated across and between generations, which work to assign value to the gift itself.

This article analyses David Monahan’s photographic portrait series of over 120 people before emigrating from post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, entitled ‘Leaving Dublin’. As a digital series that circulates across multiple media channels, it moves beyond the tradition of documentary photography into a more hybrid aesthetic, political and media environment. As well as inserting these images in multiple circulatory platforms and replicable formats, the series disrupts the dominant visual culture of emigration by expressively recasting how it is seen and thought. This article argues that the highly stylised and unsentimental aesthetic adopted by Monahan pushes the images beyond the established visual culture of sentimental departure, visualising instead transnational and multicultural histories and politics through complex circuits of migration. As such, it highlights what Mieke Bal sees as the instability of migratory culture in the city landscape. At the same time, however, it re-enacts particular social distinctions and divisions. Just as new trajectories, relationalites and stories ‘appear’ as constitutive of Dublin and contemporary mobility, so also other trajectories, relationalities and mobilities are disappeared in ways that keep an exclusionary topography and politics of mobility in place. This is evident in the insistent and persistent separation between Irish asylum-seeking/immigration and emigration-focused digital photographic projects. So, although digitisation facilitates reflexive ways of communicating contemporary migration, and Monahan’s project succeeds in forging subtle connections, it also re-enacts structured disconnection and forgetting.

This article draws on qualitative research in Basel, Switzerland with highly skilled migrant women from various European nationalities employed in a number of professional sectors. It seeks to contribute to the literatures on the sociologies of migration and the sociologies of everyday life by intersecting the conceptual frame of ‘affective habitus’ with the phenomenology of material culture in unpacking how emotions triggered by objects shape settling practices in host societies. The analysis centres on pathways of cultural production as they unfold through memories, objects and experiential return visits. The authors find sociological depth in applying ‘affective habitus’ as the conceptual framing to examine how mediations of memory and emotions can extend understandings of how women migrants create agentic ways to settle in new host societies while making cultural accommodations. The conceptual terrain of ‘affective habitus’ is theorised through a phenomenological approach to gendered migrancy and cultural materiality in everyday life.

Research focusing on the management of emotion features prominently in studies of employee attrition, gender inequality and workplace satisfaction, but rarely in research on worker solidarity. Against a backdrop of increasing individualisation within late modern society, research about workplace management of emotion has become bifurcated along sociological or organisational psychology lines. Within the sociology literature, management of emotion is theorised as a commercialised, relational and (often) alienating experience. Within organisational psychology literature and research, the emphasis is on harnessing individual traits and skills (e.g. emotional intelligence) to regulate emotions for increased productivity and employee retention. In this article, the authors call for a new research agenda that prioritises the examination of solidarity between workers alongside the analysis of emotion management. This call is based in a critical reading of the sociological and organisational psychology scholarship addressing the management of emotions. Through the example of teaching work, the authors provide a critique of scholarship on workplace strategies that promote highly individualised understandings of managing emotions through resilience training and other simplified techniques. They argue that workplaces should recognise the dangers of uncritically adopting individualised strategies for managing emotions, and propose a research agenda that seeks to understand how emotion management can affect worker solidarity.

The aim of this article is to explain how forms of consent-driven domination are produced over actors with critical capacity to question the processes of domination to which they are subjected. Drawing on observations of meetings during which actors evaluated employee sick leave, we show how domination is locally achieved in situated interactions by (a) constructing a specific situational reality, (b) transferring responsibilities in accordance with this reality, and (c) positioning the actors within the confirmed bounds of the situation. Domination is produced by exploiting a gap between the reified instituted reality and the lived realities of embodied actors. Doing so enables critiques of the workplace to be absorbed and situational responsibility to be directed towards individual employees. Engaging with French sociologist Luc Boltanski’s recent work, we refer to these processes as ‘complex domination’: the domination appears centre-less and well-intentioned politics result in permanent asymmetrical outcomes – that is, the same people always lose.

Previous research has shown how the embodied performances expected from service workers make cultural class background important for entry into these forms of jobs. However, class judgement continues to impact the worker post-entry and on-the-job. We explore this through a qualitative study of 18 middle-class women working in luxury-retail stores in Amsterdam, asking how they acquire the taste of their store for aesthetic labour. This is a case we consider pertinent given the significant class difference between these workers and their economically rich clientele. We found that: (1) workers constructed the products they sold as distinct by devaluing ‘popular’ fashion products; (2) workers managed to acquire luxury knowledge through their work practices; (3) workers purchased luxury products via employee discount, the availability of which triggered allures to emulate their upper-class customers; (4) acquiring this taste was perceived as cultural-social mobility, a perception reinforced by feelings of recognition within private consumption practices; and (5) these endeavours were often marked by both avidity and anxiety, as work concerns conflated with class concerns. We conclude by arguing that systems of classification and the labour process work in alloy, as the necessities of work drive conformity to legitimate taste and, in turn, the legitimacy of taste assists in achieving worker motivation and the extraction of labour. This, we believe, reflects potential complementarity between domination and exploitation models of class analysis.

Graduate outcomes – including rates of employment and earnings – are marked by persistent inequalities related to social class, as well as gender, ethnicity and institution. Despite national policy agendas related to social mobility and ‘fair access to the professions’, high-status occupations are disproportionately composed of those from socially privileged backgrounds, and evidence suggests that in recent decades many professions have become less socially representative. This article makes an original contribution to sociological studies of inequalities in graduate transitions and elite reproduction through a distinct focus on the ‘pre-hiring’ practices of graduate employers. It does this through a critical analysis of the graduate recruitment material of two popular graduate employers. It shows how, despite espousing commitments to diversity and inclusion, constructions of the ‘ideal’ graduate privilege individuals who can mobilise and embody certain valued capitals. Using Bourdieusian concepts of ‘social magic’ and ‘institutional habitus’, the article argues that more attention must be paid to how graduate employers’ practices constitute tacit processes of social exclusion and thus militate against the achievement of more equitable graduate outcomes and fair access to the ‘top jobs’.