Showing papers in "Sociology in 2012"

Beyond the Throwaway Society: Ordinary Domestic Practice and a Sociological Approach to Household Food Waste

Abstract: This article offers a sociological analysis of household food waste and its starting point is a critique of perspectives in which volumes of waste generation are used to infer the presence of a throwaway society. Drawing on broadly ethnographic examples, the analysis illustrates some of the ways in which the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’ arises as a consequence of the ways in which domestic practices are socially and materially organized. Specifically, attention is paid to: 1) routines of household food provisioning and the contingencies of everyday life; 2) the social relations manifest in the enduring convention of the family meal and; 3) the socio-temporal context of food practices. Taken together it is suggested that contemporary sociological approaches to home consumption, material culture and everyday life can usefully engage with public and policy concerns about the origins and consequences of food waste.

Intersectionality: Multiple Inequalities in Social Theory:

Abstract: The concept of intersectionality is reviewed and further developed for more effective use. Six dilemmas in the debates on the concept are disentangled, addressed and resolved: the distinction between structural and political intersectionality; the tension between ‘categories’ and ‘inequalities’; the significance of class; the balance between a fluidity and stability; the varyingly competitive, cooperative, hierarchical and hegemonic relations between inequalities and between projects; and the conundrum of ‘visibility’ in the tension between the ‘mutual shaping’ and the ‘mutual constitution’ of inequalities. The analysis draws on critical realism and on complexity theory in order to find answers to the dilemmas in intersectionality theory.

The Racialization of the New European Migration to the UK

Abstract: The purpose of our article is to examine how current East European migration to the UK has been racialized in immigration policy and tabloid journalism. The state’s immigration policy, we argue, exhibits features of institutionalized racism that implicitly invokes shared whiteness as a basis of racialized inclusion. The tabloids, in contrast, tend toward cultural racism in their coverage of these migrations by explicitly invoking cultural difference as a basis of racialized exclusion. Our analysis focuses on two cohorts of migrants: Hungarians, representing the larger 2004 entrants, and Romanians, representing the smaller 2007 entrants. The processes of racialization we examine in this article reveal degrees of whiteness that give ‘race’ continued currency as an idiom for making sense of these migrations and the migrants that people them

Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter

Abstract: This article presents the first steps towards a sociological understanding of emergent social media. This article uses Twitter, the most popular social media website, as its focus. Recently, the social media site has been prominently associated with social movements in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. Rather than rush to breathlessly describe its novel role in shaping contemporary social movements, this article takes a step back and considers Twitter in historical and broad sociological terms. This article is not intended to provide empirical evidence or a fully formed theoretical understanding of Twitter, but rather to provide a selected literature review and a set of directions for sociologists. The article makes connections specifically to Erving Goffman’s interactionist work, not only to make the claim that some existing sociological theory can be used to think critically about Twitter, but also to provide some initial thoughts on how such theoretical innovations can be developed.

Meeting the challenges of intensive parenting culture: gender, risk management and the moral parent

Abstract: In recent years, academics have shown interest in the phenomenon of intensive parenting, which has predominantly focused on mothers as primary caregivers. In this article we seek to move beyond approaches which invoke a maternal lens in order to consider fathers’ experience of intensive parenting in relation to their lives with partners. Drawing on data from a qualitative longitudinal study of men over the transition to fatherhood we explore men’s experiences of the benefits and challenges of an intensive parenting approach. Despite increased involvement in childcare, men appear to be relatively insulated against the demands of intensive parenting, describing the importance of autonomous decision-making over following expert advice. However, this article considers the way in which other aspects of contemporary parenting may be experienced more intensively by men, pointing to gender differentiation in risks related to a moral parenthood identity.

Emotional Reflexivity: Feeling, Emotion and Imagination in Reflexive Dialogues

Abstract: Theories of reflexivity have primarily been concerned with the way agents monitor their own actions using knowledge (Giddens) or deliberate on the social context to make choices through the internal conversation (Archer), yet none have placed emotion at the centre of reflexivity. While emotion is considered in theories of reflexivity it is generally held at bay, being seen as a possible barrier to clear reflexive thought. Here, I challenge this position and, drawing on the work of C.H. Cooley, argue that feeling and emotion are central to reflexive processes, colouring the perception of self, others and social world, thus influencing our responses in social interaction as well as the way we reflexively monitor action and deliberate on the choices we face. Emotional reflexivity is therefore not simply about the way emotions are reflexively monitored or ordered, but about how emotion informs reflexivity itself.

The Roots of Domination: Beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci

Abstract: In this article I examine Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic domination as based on misrecognition and compare it with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony based on consent. Drawing on ethnographic research in workplaces in the USA and Hungary I show how both theories are flawed. Gramsci does not appreciate the importance of mystification as a foundation for stable hegemony in advanced capitalism while Bourdieu’s notion of misrecognition, based on the notion of habitus, is too deep to comprehend the fragility of state socialist regimes. Comparative analysis, I argue, calls for a concept of domination that is more contingent than Bourdieu’s symbolic domination, yet deeper than Gramsci’s hegemony.

Low-Income Families and Coping Through Brands: Inclusion or Stigma?

Abstract: This article highlights the paradoxical coping strategies employed by low-income families. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 families in the UK, it is demonstrated that individuals initiate stra...

The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion

Abstract: This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Via Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

Climate Change and Society: The Chimera of Behaviour Change Technologies

Abstract: Our dependence on energy from fossil fuels is causing potentially disastrous global warming and posing fundamental questions about the commensurability of consumer capitalism and a sustainable soci...

The Dimensions of Occupational Gender Segregation in Industrial Countries

Abstract: It is well known that women and men tend to work in different occupations, and generally held that this disadvantages women. In order to understand how far this occupational segregation entails gender inequality it is necessary to examine the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the segregation. The horizontal dimension measures difference without inequality while the vertical dimension measures the extent of the occupational inequality. Two measures of vertical inequality are used: pay and social stratification (CAMSIS). Measurements over a number of industrially developed countries show the expected male advantage with regard to pay. However, contrary to popular beliefs, women are consistently advantaged in terms of stratification. Also, it is found that the position of women is more favourable where the overall segregation is higher – the lower the male advantage on pay and the greater the female advantage on stratification.

Critical Mass, Social Networks and Collective Action: Exploring Student Political Worlds:

Abstract: This article explores the role of ‘critical mass’ and social networks in the generation of collective action. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative (social network) data, the article argues that both are pivotal in the process whereby collective action takes shape. The empirical focus of the article is student politics but it is argued that the mechanisms and dynamics identified have a much wider domain of application.

Work Identity in Crisis? Rethinking the Problem of Attachment and Loss at Work

Abstract: The identity and meaning people obtain from their work is a central issue in contemporary sociology. There is a debate between those suggesting that we have witnessed either great rupture or continuity in the way employees engage with their jobs. This article reframes the question posed, developing a critical theoretical framework for understanding narratives of change derived from a range of theorists using concepts of nostalgia, tradition and generations. This framework is then used to read a set of work/life history interviews and autobiographical material from mainly older male workers in the UK railway industry who lament the erosion of their workplace culture and the sustainable moral order of the past. The article seeks to move beyond dismissing such accounts as simple nostalgia and instead suggests that these narratives can be understood as valuable organic critiques of industrial and social change emergent from work culture.

Life out of Synch: How New Patterns of Further Education and the Rise of Precarious Employment Are Reshaping Young People’s Relationships:

Abstract: Young people increasingly mix study with variable hours of employment in a precarious youth labour market. Drawing on interview material from 50 participants (supported by questionnaire data from 1...

‘Dressage Is Full of Queens!’ Masculinity, Sexuality and Equestrian Sport:

Abstract: Attitudes towards sexuality are changing and levels of cultural homophobia decreasing, yet there remain very few openly gay men within sport. As a proving ground for heteromasculinity, sport has traditionally been a hostile environment for gay men. This article is based on an ethnographic study within a sporting subworld in which gay men do appear to be accepted: equestrian sport. Drawing on inclusive masculinity theory, equestrian sport is shown to offer an unusually tolerant environment for gay men in which heterosexual men of all ages demonstrate low levels of homophobia. Inclusive masculinity theory is a useful framework for exploring the changing nature of masculinities and this study demonstrates that gay men are becoming increasingly visible and accepted within once unreceptive locales, such as sport and rural communities. However, this more tolerant attitude is purchased at the expense of a subordinated feminine Other, perpetuating the dominance of men within competitive sport. © The Author(s) 2012.

Calling for Care: ‘Disembodied’ Work, Teleoperators and Older People Living at Home

Abstract: The provision of ‘distant’ care to older people living at home through telecare technologies is often contrasted negatively to hands-on, face-to-face care: telecare is seen as a loss of care, a dehumanization. Here we challenge this view, arguing that teleoperators in telecare services do provide care to older people, often at significant emotional cost to themselves. Based on a European Commission-funded ethnographic study of two English telecare monitoring centres, we argue that telecare is not ‘disembodied’ work, but a form of care performed through the use of voice, knowledge sharing and emotional labour or self-management. We also show, in distinction to discourses promoting telecare in the UK, that successful telecare relies on the existence of social networks and the availability of hands-on care. Telecare is not a substitute for, or the opposite of, hands-on care but is at its best interwoven with it.

The Travelling Citizen: Emergent Discourses of Moral Mobility in a Study of Cycling in London:

Abstract: Drawing on accounts of travelling within London, this article explores the ways in which mobility discourses are tied to the responsibilities of ‘a good citizen’ and suggests that car-dominated automobility has been significantly fractured, at least in one urban setting. A consensus hierarchy of transport modes now configures driving as immoral, as well as dysfunctional, and cycling, in contrast, as particularly laudable. Within this new moral economy of transport, cycling holds the promise of conscientious automobility, enabling a number of explicit and implied citizenship responsibilities to be met. These include ecological responsibilities to the city and global ecosystem, but also responsibilities to enact the ‘new citizen’: a knowledgeable and alert risk-assessor competent to travel in ways that maximize independence, efficiency and health. However, cycling has its own contradictions: whilst enabling some to enact a new ‘moral’ citizenship, it simultaneously underlines the marginal citizenship of less mobile Londoners.

Constructing Mobile Places between ‘Leisure’ and ‘Transport’: A Case Study of Two Group Cycle Rides

Abstract: This article contributes to a growing literature examining the sociological significance of mobile places, exploring mobile place-making through an analysis of the practice of weekend group leisure cycling. These rides represent a mobility practice where the main aim of participants may be ‘leisure’ but most infrastructure used is designated for ‘transport’. Using ethnographic methods, the article provides an analysis of rhythm, positioning and communication on two group rides, one from Hull into the East Yorkshire countryside and one in London. External (including motor traffic flow and route type) and internal (including group composition and experience) factors shape the relationship between the riders and their ride, and hence the mobile places that they co-create. The article argues that cyclists riding in groups create distinctively flexible social spaces. These group cycling practices variously challenge, mimic and adapt to the motorized orientation of much road space.

Reclaiming the Kop? Analysing Liverpool Supporters’ 21st Century Mobilizations:

Abstract: For at least the past three decades, the sociology of football and its supporter cultures has been responsive to the social issues which have emerged within it. Today, the fact that fans rejoice and protest at overseas purchases of their club means that the time has come for research to reflect on elite-level English football’s position in a transnational space. In this context, this article focuses on the football supporters’ protests connected to Liverpool FC, centring on the Spirit of Shankly mobilization, and uses Manuel Castells’ theories to understand them. The argument that emerges is important for sociologists understanding the contemporary world because it illustrates the connections between local sites around the world, the internet as a tool through which collective action takes place, and discusses what ‘power’ means in these contexts.

Class Contestations and Australia’s Resource Boom: The Emergence of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’

Abstract: This article examines the figure of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’ or ‘Cub’ in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that ‘Bogan’, like that of ‘Chav’ in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, ‘Cubs’ have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub’s emergence, is linked to Australia’s resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to participate in consumption. We argue that access to economic capital has provided the Cub with mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption and anxiety to middle-class hegemony. As a result, the middle class has redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries, whereby, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark Cubs as ‘other’ to the middle-class deservingness, taste and morality.

Self-injury as Embodied Emotion Work: Managing Rationality, Emotions and Bodies

Abstract: Drawing on narrative research conducted in the UK about self-injury and embodiment, this article presents a novel sociological analysis of self-injury, utilizing the concept of emotion work By focusing explicitly on embodied methods of 'doing' emotion work, the article highlights the under-recognized importance of examining the practical, corporeal practices that can be involved in emotion work I reflect on the sociological and theoretical significance of examining self-injury as embodied emotion work - both as an analytic concept and as a narrative resource © The Author(s) 2012

Place, Ethics, and Everyday Eating: A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods

Abstract: In this article we investigate how ‘ethical eating’ varies across neighbourhoods and explore the classed nature of these patterns. While our focus is on ‘ethical eating’ (e.g. eating organics, local), we also discuss its relation to healthy eating. The analysis draws from interviews with families in two Toronto neighbourhoods – one upper and the other lower income. We argue that understandings and practices of ‘ethical eating’ are significantly shaped by social class as well as place-specific neighbourhood cultures which we conceptualize as part of a ‘prototypical’ neighbourhood eating style. People compare themselves to a neighbourhood prototype (positively and negatively), and this sets a standard for acceptable eating practices. This analysis helps shed light on how place is implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of class-stratified food practices.

Redefining the Sociological Project: The Cosmopolitan Challenge

Abstract: Once upon a time the categories of ‘class’ and ‘class conflict’ were the conceptual tools to unlock and understand the key political dynamics of the modern world. But this is no longer the case. Just think a moment of the ‘cosmopolitical events’ that changed the world during the last 25 years – the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the financial crisis, climate change or the two ongoing processes: the nuclear catastrophe in Japan and the revolts against the authoritarian Arab regimes. All of those have two features in common: (1) they come by total surprise, which means they are beyond sociological categories and imagination; and (2) all of them are transnational or global in their scope and implications. From this follows: the mainstream of sociology still floods loftily above the lowlands of epochal transformations in a condition of universalistic superiority and instinctive certainty. This universalistic social theory, whether stucturalist, interactionist, Marxist, criticalor systems-theory, is both out of date and provincial. Out of date because it excludes a priori what can be observed empirically – a fundamental transformation of society and politics within modernity; provincial because it mistakenly absolutizes the trajectory, historical experience and future expectation of western, predominantly European or North-American, modernization and thereby also fails to see its own particularity. My thesis is that class is too soft a category to capture the cosmopolitan challenge at the beginning of the 21st century. The social sciences, especially sociology, need a cosmopolitan turn in research and theory, a paradigm shift from ‘methodological nationalism’ to ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. We are not living in an era of cosmopolitanism but in an age of cosmopolitization. There is an ongoing very lively

The Structure of the Upper Class: A Social Space Approach

Abstract: This article seeks to identify the internal divisions within the ‘upper class’ of Norway, defined as comprising different types of property owners, top executives and business managers. Bourdieu’s ...

Integrating Children’s Human Rights and Child Poverty Debates: Examples from Young Lives in Ethiopia and India

Abstract: There are few attempts to link human rights discourses and child poverty debates, though the field is expanding. Within sociology, both the study of rights and of childhood are marginal. This article utilises a sociological approach to bridge rights and poverty debates in relation to children and explore why there are barriers to implementing children’s rights in specific instances. Drawing on Young Lives research, a longitudinal study of children growing up in poverty, the article explores how discourses of children’s rights play out in local contexts and how a narrowly legal perspective fails to engage with children’s experiences of poverty. The article concludes by proposing that a broader, sociological approach to rights as not only rules, but also as structures, relationships and processes (Galant and Parlevliet, 2005) can better engage with the causes and consequences of poverty, while also developing locally relevant responses.

Answer Formats in British Census and Survey Ethnicity Questions: Does Open Response Better Capture ‘Superdiversity’?

Abstract: During a period of unprecedented ethnicity data collection in Britain, an almost universal characteristic of this practice has been the mandated use of the decennial census ethnicity classifications. In Canada and the USA a greater plurality of methods has included open response, now recommended for the 2020 US Census. As the ethnic diversity of Britain has increased, driven by immigration dynamics and population mixing leading to ‘superdiversity’, the census is no longer able to capture the new populations. The validity and utility of unprompted open response is examined in several ‘mixed race’ datasets. It is argued that open response can be a modus operandi for large-scale ethnicity data collection and that the lack of consistency in recording of such responses need not necessarily be viewed as a drawback. Open response offers substantial insights into the country’s superdiversity in a way that ethnicity categorization alone cannot.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Islam in England and Wales: Evidence from the Citizenship Survey

Abstract: If secularization is increasing over time, this should be observable in patterns of religiosity across the generations. The Home Office Citizenship Survey (of adults in England and Wales) and its accompanying Young People’s Survey provide a relatively rare example of individual-level and intergenerational British data on religious transmission, with indications of religious affiliation or practice across three generations. Secondary analysis was conducted on the 2003 data, looking at religious transmission in four groups: Christians, Muslims, those from non-Christian non-Muslim religions and those with no religion. Associations between religious transmission and a range of social factors are presented, with these including ethnicity, gender, country of birth and socioeconomic characteristics. The data suggest a complex pattern of religious transmission over the three generations and a higher transmission of Islam than any of the other religious categories. There is, therefore, a focus on Islam in the presentation and discussion of the data analysis.

Ethical Boundary-work in the Animal Research Laboratory:

Abstract: The use of animals in scientific experiments continues to attract significant controversy, particularly in the UK. This article draws on in-depth interviews with senior laboratory scientists who use animals in their research. A key claim is that animal research is necessary for medical advance. However, this promissory discourse relies on the construction of three boundaries. The first is between humans and non-human animals. The second is between the positive and less positive impacts of Home Office regulation. The third is between the use of animals in medicine versus other domains such as farming. The article analyses these discourses and evaluates the applicability of ‘ethical boundary-work’ (Wainwright et al., 2006a). I conclude that the concept is a potentially useful device for foregrounding ethics but argue that it carries several dangers for sociologists interested in claim-making in areas of controversy.

The ‘Gift’ of Help: Domestic Helpers and the Maintenance of Hierarchy in the Household Division of Labour:

Abstract: Based on in-depth interviews with 24 working couples who hire domestic helpers in Hong Kong, this article examines the hiring of help as an instance of unequal social exchange in which mothers are ...

On the Sociology of Human Rights: Theorising the Language-structure of Rights

Abstract: This article defends the claim that human rights is a legitimate subject of inquiry for sociologists, and proceeds to present the case for a particular application of sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Sociology, it claims, is equipped to study the dynamics of social institutions – socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed – and since the mid-20th century, human rights has become such an institution. The article advocates an intellectual project for the sociology of rights, drawing on a diverse range of sources, that recognises how human rights abuses are made possible when the very concept of the ‘human’ is subtly redefined through these language-structures.