Sociological Research Online

The increase in one-person households is regarded as a manifestation of the process of social individualization that strengthens individuals’ ability to make lifestyle choices to the detriment of certain social institutions. However, the background circumstances to solo living can vary widely and often stem from structural determinants, such as gender inequalities, within the framework of a highly competitive society. This article analyses the nature and social significance of solo-living in Spain through a case study of young adult women (25–45 years of age) residing in an urban environment (Barcelona and Jaen). The analyses focus on aspects connected with the theory of social individualization (e.g. the demands of working life and expectations regarding life partners, motherhood and social relations). Four different profiles of women can be distinguished in the results: ‘cosmopolitans’, ‘unconditionals’, ‘empowered’, and ‘temporaries’. In broad terms, the interviewees’ narratives bear witness to the process of individualization (self-realization with which to engage in a personal life project), although tensions come into play between personal expectations and the demands of working life, especially in the spheres of sexual partnership and motherhood.

The ‘Preston Model’ (PM) has substantially improved the socio-economic outlook of Preston (UK). It is a community wealth-building approach, harnessing local economic power for a more resilient, environmentally sustainable, democratic economy and socially cohesive community, prioritising social value, through private and public sector partnerships. This qualitative research article investigates how people in local ‘anchor institutions’ (major wealth creators and employers ‘anchored’ in Preston) perceive the PM. Focusing on economic democracy and solidarity, and building on organisational and social identity theory, its relation with democratic participation, organisational identification and pride processes enabling social change is examined. Most interviewees doubt its organisational and local impact; nevertheless, they exhibit a sense of pride as its ‘drivers’, attributing to it ‘higher’ ethical values. While the PM exerts a subtle emotional, aspirational, and socio-cultural influence, it still represents a shifting, alternative socio-economic paradigm, emerging through both individual and collective assent, rather than specific policy directives.

This article uniquely contributes to critical discussions about parenting support in contemporary social science research that has examined the recent political and public attention on parenting. The studies highlight the increased attention on individualised parenting support focused on the parent–child relationship. Based on an analysis of 310 family support projects initiated in Finland, this research found that another orientation exists alongside individualised parenting support, which has gained only little attention in recent studies about parenting support. That alternative focuses on a communal parenting support, wherein parenting support is conducted by means of community (re)building. This article summarises how anxiety about parenting overlaps with discussions about community as well as ‘the family decline’, creating a need for community (re)building. In this study, I show how concern within family support projects is harnessed to establish ‘communion’, representing a third category alongside the more common sociological notions of ‘society’ and ‘community’. However, fundamental tensions appear as projects attempt to build community, which I also discuss in this article.

This article explores the forms of harmful practices and harms experienced by individuals since the implementation of the Gambling Act 2005. Employing the state-corporate crime paradigm as an analytical lens through which to examine the narratives of individuals who gamble and affected family members, and supporting secondary sources, it illustrates the ‘collateral damage’ that has resulted from an industry that embeds harmful practices as a means of capital accumulation. By providing insight into the often-hidden array of economic, physical, emotional, and psychological, and cultural harms that result from the entrenchment of a leisure culture that institutes ever more potent forms of aleatory consumption, the article offers a rare sociological critique of an industry that has been able to flourish as a consequence of an alliance between state and business.

In recent years, many households have shifted from employing a full-time or part-time domestic worker to using an outsourced domestic cleaning services company that specialises in professional household cleaning services. Few studies have focused on outsourced domestic cleaning services from clients’ perspectives. While there is limited research on the topic, a possible reason for the increase in outsourced domestic cleaning services might be that the domestic labour needs of the middle-class are changing. The decline in the stigma of voluntary childlessness and better educational and career opportunities for women have impacted household compositions. There has been a rise in one-person households and couples without children. These changes affect how domestic work is approached. Some women continue to perform domestic labour themselves, while others employ domestic workers or use outsourced domestic cleaning services. Against this background, this study sought to establish how changes in household compositions are linked to peoples’ preferences to use outsourced domestic cleaning services to take care of their domestic cleaning needs rather than employing a domestic worker on a full-time or part-time basis. This study draws on 18 qualitative interviews with clients of domestic cleaning services and shows that people who live alone, as a childless couple or in an empty-nest household, use outsourced domestic cleaning services for their convenience, efficiency, and flexibility. Couples with children tend to rely on personal help when it comes to care work but outsource less emotional domestic duties to domestic cleaning service companies. This study contributes to new insights by showing that domestic cleaning services are used by households who can afford and require flexible cleaning services offered by outsourced domestic cleaning services.

Drawing on the chronic illness scholarship and identity theories, this article aims to deepen the understanding of the biographical disruptions experienced by undergraduate students living with a long-term health condition. Data are drawn from in-depth interviews with six undergraduate (female) students attending university in England. The analysis highlights the ways chronicity and multiplicity come together to shape students’ health and social identities. The findings reveal three narratives of the Self: the ill Self, the determined Self, and the authentic Self. These distinct, yet interconnected, narratives highlight the complex shifts in the Self as students sought ways to ‘push through’ multiple (academic, health, social) pressures. Maintaining academic and social engagement met with significant challenge, ultimately shaping the emotional and social lives of these students. The article offers a novel contribution to how undergraduate students navigate multiple identities in the face of ongoing illness.

Previous research has argued that occupational prestige is a social fact founded in the collective conscience and prestige perceptions morally grounded. Ideas of strong consensus in perceptions rest on comparisons of compressed mean values, and the similarity between what prestige an occupation has and what it ought to have has not previously been empirically explored. Drawing on survey data and a discrepancy index, the present study explores the resemblance between descriptive facts and normative values in perceptions of occupational prestige and consensus and discrepancies in prestige perceptions. The analysis showed discrepancies in descriptive and normative prestige perceptions for welfare and cultural occupations. The differences in perceptions can be explained by sex, beliefs about what factors give prestige to an occupation, and the prestige of one’s occupation.

Sociological research has long suggested that cultural participation is socially stratified. We build on this literature to discuss the role of the subjective and objective dimensions of stratification and how they are linked to practices of social distinction through cultural consumption. The aim of this study is to understand (1) the effect of subjective and objective social status on patterns of cultural participation and (2) the implications of the status inconsistency. We use a probabilistic and representative sample of the Chilean urban population older than the age of 18. Latent class analyses show that a significant proportion of Chileans can be considered cultural omnivores. Multinomial diagonal reference models suggest that omnivorousness is positively predicted by subjective and objective social status. Moreover, regarding inconsistency, objective social status is prominent in the explanation of omnivorousness for both status-underestimating and status-overestimating individuals. These findings provide important insights for discussing the implications of status inconsistency on cultural consumption.

‘Ageing in place’ is a key component of UK policy, aimed at supporting older people to remain living in their own homes and communities for as long as possible. Although wide-ranging, the scholarly literature in this field has not sufficiently examined the interconnections between ageing in place and the changing experience of ‘home’ over time. This article addresses this gap in a novel way by bringing together qualitative secondary analysis of longitudinal data with critical literature on ‘home’ and Mason’s cutting-edge concept of ‘affinities’ to understand the multi-dimensionality of home in relation to ageing in place. The article makes significant methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to the field of scholarship on home, by demonstrating how homes are made and unmade over time. Discussions of home emerged organically in the longitudinal data that focused on people’s travel and transport use, allowing our qualitative secondary analysis approach to look anew at how experiences of home are dynamically shaped by people’s potent connections inside and outside the dwelling. Presenting an empirical analysis of four case studies, the article suggests that future discussions in the field of ageing in place should pay closer attention to the factors that shape experiences of the un/making of home over time, such as how deteriorating physical and mental health can shape how people experience their dwelling and neighbourhood as well as their relationships across these settings.

This article seeks to provide a detailed account of emotional labour adopted by female bartenders when faced with unwanted sexual attention at work. In the field, I implemented an ethnographic research design and maximised opportunities for data collection through the use of interviews with eight participants and participant observations while employed at the same venue. Drawing on previous theoretical thought, the data gathered will outline the learnt, and most common, forms of display rules barstaff demonstrate while engaging with unwanted interactions, and, from the viewpoint of the female barstaff, the expected display rules envisioned by some male customers. I also detail the collapse of display rules during some unwanted scenarios (e.g. infrequent) and the inevitable impact of implementing emotional labour under the duress of unwanted encounters–emotional dissonance and burnout. I conclude with a suggestion that there is a potential for a multitude of display rules that are adopted by barstaff dependent on the customer interaction (e.g. aggressive, sickness due to intoxication) in a public house.

This article draws on the findings of the research project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM), a study investigating migration, sex work, and human trafficking in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. In this article, we focus on how racialized categories are mobilized in antitrafficking practices in France. Since April 2016, the French government has enforced a prohibitionist and neo-abolitionist law criminalizing the demand for sexual services. This coincided with the targeting of Chinese and Nigerian cis-women and with the neglect of Latina trans women working in the sex industry according to racialized and sex-gendered understandings of victimhood. Whereas Chinese women tend to be presented by humanitarian rhetoric as silent victims of Chinese male-dominated mafias, Nigerian women have come to embody the ultimate figure of the victim of trafficking by an overpowering Black male criminality. Meanwhile, (sexual) humanitarian actors have neglected Latina trans women’s ongoing experiences of extreme violence and marginalization.

Despite its ‘wordless’ and hidden characteristics, it is within the everyday tasks, routines, and rhythms that consumption takes place, from getting up every morning, having breakfast, going to work or school, having lunch, going home, having dinner, reading a book, surfing the Internet, watching TV, and probably doing similar things again and again. This study examines this routinized daily use of time of employed individuals based on the 2014–2015 UK Time-Use Survey data. In doing this, we focus on individual’s day-to-day activities and how they are routinized or how they are formed into stabilized practices. Starting from the definition of stable practices, we apply a relatively new method of social network analysis to visualize stable practices during workdays. We then analyse the cohesion between practices based on work hours and connections and coordination between practices. Our results suggest that work arrangements create stable practices that by themselves are stone pillars of daily routines. This implies that the removal (or ‘unlocking’) of stable practices during these time periods could produce some – albeit marginal – decongestion of routinized activities.

The aim of this study is to describe long-term changes in intergenerational social mobility in Hungary between 1973 and 2018 and to provide an overview of the current situation that has not been examined previously. Our main questions are whether trends of the earlier periods continued and whether previous gender differences persisted at the end of the 2010s. According to our results total mobility continued to decline and it hit its lowest point in decades at the end of the 2010s. In addition, decreasing proportion of the population move upwards compared with their fathers and an increasing proportion experience the deterioration of their social position. While earlier research found that structural changes in society triggered upward mobility the polarising class structure after 1990 set into motion contrary trends. In this period, structural mobility increasingly typically meant downward mobility. As regards relative mobility chances associated with working in high and low occupational positions, we concluded that the ceiling seems to be stickier than the floor as a rule, that is, the role of origin is more decisive in keeping a favourable social position than in the transmission of a disadvantaged position across generations. The odds for someone born into unfavourable circumstances to rise are greater than for those of someone who was brought up in privileged circumstances to slide down.

Persistent hiring discrimination as demonstrated by correspondence experiments incites immigrant job candidates and their descendants to modify their résumé to hide their immigrant status, that is, résumé whitening. To date, we have little to no empirical evidence on how common this is in practice. We test the extent of résumé whitening with a representative survey of immigrants in Switzerland (N = 7659). Around 9% of the immigrants used some résumé whitening. Immigrants appear to use résumé whitening strategically when experiencing or anticipating discrimination. Future correspondence experiments should take this into account to maximize external validity.

This article discusses the use of autonomous, asynchronous, timelines to analyse personal and organizational experiences of COVID-19 using an online platform, LucidSpark. We evaluate the benefits and limitations of this approach and highlight findings in three areas: aesthetics, the balance of personal and organizational information, and the identification of key events. We argue that timelines generate fascinating data about participants’ personal and professional experiences of COVID-19. Then, we discuss the limitations of the data, and suggest how the method may be refined and used in combination with other approaches. By themselves, timelines provide limited data about how events relate to each other. Instead, timelines serve as useful pre-interview activities that should be combined with additional methods.

Two years after the first wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), one fact seems to be emerging clearly: lockdowns affect mental health differently across generations. This article uses data collected before and after the first wave of COVID-19 on a sample of 5,859 respondents, showing that the first lockdown worsened the mental health of the younger generations (Gen Y and Gen Z) in particular. Given that the older generations are considered the most vulnerable in this global pandemic, this may seem surprising. However, our data reveal that the pandemic outbreak raised very different concerns in different generations. While older people appear to be worried about the economy and their own health, younger people were more concerned about their lifestyles and, generally, their social relationships. This suggests that some of the mechanisms behind the exacerbation of younger people’s mental health may lie at the intersection of these two issues. On one hand, a life lived essentially online undermines all those processes of social capital activation that occur through leisure and face-to-face encounters, from which Gen Z may have suffered in particular. On the other hand, not only has the pandemic added further uncertainty to Generation Y’s career paths but working from home has also forced them to reorganize family routines and construct entirely new ones with colleagues using computers and smartphones. The article reflects on the upheavals of work and leisure to foster research on networks, social capital, and mental health in this period of a continuing pandemic.