Sociological Review

Jung, Minwoo

doi: 10.1177/00380261221104386pmid: N/A

How could queer activism for social change be possible in an authoritarian but neoliberal environment? What does neoliberalism imply for queer struggles in non-Western contexts where liberal democracy is absent or non-existent? This article introduces the concept of ‘quiet politics’ to establish a new theoretical lens for understanding queer organizing under global capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data on the rise of corporate diversity activism in Singapore, it analyzes how queer employees navigate the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in multinational corporations. The concept of quiet politics helps us understand the nuanced ways in which queer subjects ‘quietly’ mobilize themselves through a negotiation of neoliberalism, queer politics, and the authoritarian government that persecutes homosexuality. In doing so, this article challenges the Western notion of queer liberalism and sheds new light on the complex entanglement of neoliberal capitalism, corporate diversity, contentious politics, and queer activism from a global perspective.

Essanhaji, Zakia; van Reekum, Rogier

doi: 10.1177/00380261221083452pmid: N/A

Diversity is a widely shared concern within contemporary universities. Most diversity research focuses on what universities are saying and doing about diversity. Herein lies the assumption that researchers already know ‘the’ problem of diversity before studying it and that it stays the same during and after investigation. This article takes a different approach by following how diversity becomes a problem in a concrete academic setting. More specifically, we ask how conditions of knowledge production intervene with, transform, and contribute to what is known as the problem of diversity. We thereby demonstrate how diversity is made into multiple problems throughout a single setting. More importantly, we show how these problems never fully come to contain the controversy of diversity as epistemic troubles routinely (re)emerged. Indeed, our research provoked such troubles. As one of the researchers was recurringly understood as an embodiment of diversity, fieldwork itself elicited and shaped the persistent controversy of diversity.

Murji, Karim

doi: 10.1177/00380261221108584pmid: N/A

While Stuart Hall is often acknowledged as a public intellectual, it is argued here that a better way of understanding his practice is as an interventionist, whose public engagements are always set in a specific context. This way of seeing Hall draws on his own words and from approaches to intellectual work that foreground how scholars present themselves. Combining this approach with Hall’s own reading of Gramsci as a grounded intellectual, this article then illustrates the idea of Hall as an interventionist sociologist through three examples of his public works on race and racism, exemplifying his well-known use of conjunctural analysis. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold: first it seeks to ‘disambiguate’ Hall from the public intellectual label; and secondly in resituating him it highlights his public engagements on race as interventions in and as sociology.

Lewicki, Aleksandra

doi: 10.1177/00380261221108596pmid: N/A

The scholarship on institutional racism has emerged from contexts such as Australia, the UK or the US. Less is known about how racism operates within institutional settings elsewhere. What is more, our understanding of Whiteness is shaped by this Anglocentric literature. In this article, I explore the contextual features of Whiteness in residential care in Germany. More specifically, I trace how institutional routines shape affective subjectivities and thereby develop material effects. The study draws on 17 expert interviews and 20 interviews with managers of care homes run by the two largest providers, the Christian welfare associations Caritas and Diakonie. Respondents frequently highlighted their organisation’s commitment to equality, which they saw grounded in its Christian ethos, their professional self-understanding as carers, or Germany’s post-racial nationhood. Paradoxically, however, my analysis shows that respondents also deployed these ‘representations of self’ to justify access and service quality differentials. On this basis, I argue that Whiteness materialises via self-ascribed civility, ‘goodness’ and egalitarianism in the German welfare state. Signified by visual markers, Whiteness emerges from projections of purity, innocence and good intentions. In varying ways, groups distinctively racialised as ‘Other’, notably as ‘Black’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Eastern European’, are placed outside this notion of Whiteness.

Lamberg, Emma

doi: 10.1177/00380261221091009pmid: N/A

Even though flexibility, insecurity and precarity characterise much of today’s work, the promise of self-realisation through work remains as powerful as ever. Following Weeks’ work on the post-Fordist work ethic and Hochschild’s research on feeling rules, this article analyses how young women negotiate the post-Fordist work ethic and its emotional obligations. Drawing on interviews with 39 young women studying in the care and media fields in Finland, the article proposes the conceptualisation of post-Fordist feeling rules as a way to capture how young women become workers by managing contemporary work’s emotional requirements and contradictions. This article adds to the sociology of youth and labour in the post-Fordist era by foregrounding the role of feelings in the production of youth as workers and unpacking the post-Fordist work ethic’s gendered, industry-specific and emotional dimensions.

Macatangay, Ana Carolina; Roscoe, Philip

doi: 10.1177/00380261221077483pmid: N/A

The flourishing literature of valuation studies has shown how values are enacted and temporarily settled through sociomaterial processes, highlighting the contestations and dissonances inherent in valuing. We extend this concern through a study of a sudden collapse and reconstruction of value – what counts as good – in a US government agency. Using ethnographic case study methods, we explore how the US Child Support Enforcement Program’s performance measures breached a state agency’s operational framework and disrupted its understanding of good performance. Following the traces left behind by the measures, we demonstrate how actors and devices formed new networks of value, transforming the agency from one of the worst to one of the most outstanding performers in the nation. At the same time, new and unexpected notions of ‘good’ emerge. We transpose the notion of rupture from micro-sociological theory to show the collective efforts involved in making a sudden disruption and realignment of values.

Moran, Rebecca; Salter, Michael

doi: 10.1177/00380261221091012pmid: N/A

This article draws on theories of therapeutic politics to explore the role of institutionalised dignity as a medium for the social and political participation of traumatised people. Using the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as a case study, the article offers a psychosocial account of shame and humiliation as key characteristics of the phenomenology of trauma, and presents dignity as the organising principle of a therapeutic politics. Through interviews with survivors of child sexual abuse who testified to the Commission, as well as former Commission staff, the article describes the practices and structures of dignity as they were institutionalised within the Commission. We suggest that institutionalised dignity can ground and guide the theory and practice of a therapeutic politics and institutional responses to trauma, violence and abuse.

Evans, Elizabeth

doi: 10.1177/00380261221111231pmid: N/A

Social movement scholars have increasingly examined how political intersectionality helps reveal and explain whose issues and interests are marginalised or privileged within particular activist spaces and discourses. Hitherto, much of the intersectional analysis into social movements has interrogated questions of sameness, difference and power in relation to feminist, anti-racist and queer organising; this article builds upon our knowledge of social movements and intersectionality by exploring the perceptions and experiences of disability activists in the UK. The research draws upon 24 semi-structured interviews undertaken with disability rights activists, finding that a traditional emphasis on unity means that those who are multiply marginalised still experience a silencing of issues and interests of importance to them; moreover, while there is a recognition of difference, this is principally understood in relation to impairment or social class. Simultaneously, the research finds evidence of an increasing tendency amongst disability activists in the UK to engage with intersectionality, both in how they understand disability but also in terms of how they organise.

Fletcher, James Rupert; Zubair, Maria; Roche, Moïse

doi: 10.1177/00380261211059920pmid: N/A

Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have been promoted, as evident in government, third sector and research trajectories. From the 2000s, engagements with ethnicity have played an increasingly important role in these trajectories. Minority ethnic (ME) populations have emerged as a new type of dementia problem. Observations about diagnosis rates and timings, medication and nursing support (including care home admission) are normatively appraised to associate minority ethnicity with poor dementia outcomes. These outcomes are then attributed to purported cultural shortcomings of these populations. The emergence of (minority) ethnicity as a problem supports a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia, wherein citizens must govern their conduct accordingly so as not to become like the imagined ‘ethnic’ antagonist. Ultimately, dementia’s newfound ethnicity problem may not serve the interests of people affected by dementia so much as researchers in the field, who should therefore reflect on their own contributions.

Schneider, Tanja; Brenninkmeijer, Jonna; Woolgar, Steve

doi: 10.1177/00380261221092200pmid: N/A

The figure of the brain has continued to rise in prominence for at least 30 years. This development continues to raise important questions: in particular, to what extent and in what ways does the brain supplant the person as the presumed origin of human behaviour? Whereas it has previously been discussed in general terms, here we address this question through an ethnographic study of the experimental articulation of the brain in neuromarketing research. Drawing on analytical themes from science and technology studies, we argue that it is crucial to investigate the enactment of the brain in situated practice and to understand the effects on prevailing accountability relations. We analyse the enactment of the ‘consuming’ brain in neuromarketing experiments and in experts’ communication of experimental results. We show how the consuming brain emerges from reconfigured sets of socio-material relations (between e.g. consumers, brains, brain scanning operators, consultants) and how this entails a redistribution of accountability relations. This results in an ontological respecification of the consumer, who is no longer deemed accountable for his/her actions. Instead spokespersons on behalf of the brain – neuromarketing technologies and experts – assume accountability for revealing why consumers buy what they buy. We conclude that the putative shift from person to brain is in fact characterised by a redistribution of accountability relations in neuromarketing practices. We call for further studies of accountability redistributions in practice, so as better to situate novel explanations of human behaviour.