Sociology

Newlands, Gemma

doi: 10.1177/00380385211063362pmid: N/A

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.

Simpson, Ruth; Morgan, Rachel; Lewis, Patricia; Rumens, Nick

doi: 10.1177/00380385221081342pmid: N/A

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.

Zadeh, Sophie; Jadva, Vasanti; Golombok, Susan

doi: 10.1177/00380385211073238pmid: 41141418

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.

Humphris, Rachel

doi: 10.1177/00380385211063367pmid: N/A

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.

Townsend, Robert; Cushion, Christopher

doi: 10.1177/00380385211073229pmid: N/A

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.

Hudde, Ansgar

doi: 10.1177/00380385211063366pmid: N/A

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.

Neubert, Dieter

doi: 10.1177/00380385211063341pmid: N/A

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.

Choi, Susanne YP

doi: 10.1177/00380385211073237pmid: N/A

The present study examines how global multiple migration – a pattern of migration characterised by multiple changes of destination internationally in one’s lifetime – becomes a strategy employed by highly educated, Chinese self-identified gay men to navigate social stigmatisation, negotiate family pressure, circumvent state oppression and achieve desired life goals. By examining the intersection between sexuality, migration and class, the present study contributes to the sexuality and migration literature. It explores how relationships between sexuality and migration are related and mediated by class-based capital. It adds to the discussion that migration has increasingly become a multi-directional and open-ended process. For the class and social inequality literature, it seeks to understand how global multiple migration has become an element of social stratification and generates mobility capital. It also highlights how sexuality influences the value of mobility capital for the pursuit of an authentic self.

Atkinson, Will

doi: 10.1177/00380385211069520pmid: N/A

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.

Hodgson, James; Balmer, Andrew

doi: 10.1177/00380385211073233pmid: N/A

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.