Showing papers in "The Sociological Review in 2016"

Habitus clivé and the emotional imprint of social mobility

Abstract: Increasing social mobility is the ‘principal goal’ of the British Government's social policy (Cabinet Office, 2011: 5) However, while policy perspectives present mobility as an unambiguously progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies looking at the impact of mobility on individuals themselves Drawing on 39 lifecourse interviews with upwardly mobile respondents drawn from the UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project (CCSE), this paper examines how mobility affects the psychic and emotional life of the individual More specifically, it examines how mobility influences social, familial and intimate relationships, as well as the ontological coherence of the self Following Bourdieu's (2004: 127) description of his own upward trajectory, the paper argues that the concept of a divided habitus, or habitus clive, may be particularly useful for understanding some iterations of the contemporary mobility experience, particularly its most long-range forms Such a concept, it argues, helps explain how the emotional pull of class loyalties can entangle subjects in the affinities of the past, and why – despite prevailing political rhetoric – upward mobility may remain a state that not everyone unequivocally aspires to

A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus

Abstract: Retracing the philosophical origins and initial usage of habitus by Bourdieu to account for the historical disjuncture wrought by the Algerian war of national liberation and the postwar modernizati...

Interface methods : renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology

Abstract: This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called ‘interface methods’. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research – thinking methods as ‘interface methods’ – and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co-occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium.

The sexual in Chinese sociology: homosexuality studies in contemporary China

Abstract: Through a meta-literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio-economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party-state. Fused with the bio-medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s–1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey-based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post-structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homose...

Toward a critical sociology of lifestyle migration: reconceptualizing migration and the search for a better way of life

Abstract: This article places under critical and reflexive examination the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of lifestyle migration. Developed to explain the migration of the relatively affluent in search of a better way of life, this concept draws attention to the role of lifestyle within migration, alongside understandings of migration as one stage within the ongoing lifestyle choices and trajectories of individual migrants. Through a focus on two paradigms that are currently at work within theorizations of this social phenomenon – individualization and mobilities – we evaluate their contribution to this flourishing field of research. In this way, we demonstrate the limitations and constraints of these for understanding lifestyle migration; engaging with long-standing debates around structure and agency to make a case for the recognition of history in understanding the pursuit of ‘a better way of life’; questioning the extent to which meaning is made through movement, and the politics and ethics of replacing migration with mobilities. Through this systematic consideration, we pave the way for re-invigorated theorizing on this topic, and the development of a critical sociology of lifestyle migration.

What is a Global Field? Theorizing Fields beyond the Nation-State:

Abstract: While scholarship on global and transnational fields has been emerging, hitherto contributions have rarely or not explicitly discussed how Bourdieu's field theory has to be altered when its use exp...

Negotiating the boundaries of intimacy: the personal lives of asexual people

Abstract: This paper uses findings from research diaries to explore the use of practices of intimacy among asexual people. While much of the literature to date has focused on the supposedly transformative and political nature of uniquely asexual practices of intimacy, our findings suggest something different. Rather than seeking to transform the nature of intimate relationships, asexual people make pragmatic adjustments and engage in negotiations to achieve the forms of physical and emotional intimacy they seek. We discuss this in relation to three areas: friendships, sex as a practice of intimacy, and exclusion from intimacy. Our findings suggest the importance of not only considering the social context in which asexual people practise intimacy, but also how the practices in which they engage may be shared with non-asexual people.

Affective History, Working-Class Communities and Self-Determination:

Abstract: Using a concept of affective history, this paper explores the common creation of everyday being-ness, producing common meanings that may have existed and been passed down over hundreds of years. Indeed, some of those meanings clearly become potent symbols binding us together. Thus, common meanings, held for many hundreds of years can have an effect in relation to the construction of communal beingness in the present. Applying this approach to research in working class communities with a history of suffering or displacement, often understood by agencies as ‘hard to reach’, demands that we take a creative approach to research. Methodologically, this work came out of listening to a fragmentary history of movement and exclusion that emerged out of attending to the collection of often small, anecdotal, details in conversations and interviews. This approach is explored with reference to using a co-production research framework.

The biosocial: sociological themes and issues

Abstract: Biology: Scott and Marshall’s authoritative and bestselling Dictionary of Sociology (2009) has no entry for it. There are entries for Wilfred Bion, the Kleinian psychoanalyst, or for sociometry, the almost-forgotten method of measuring social relationships. In place of biology, we find an entry for ‘biological reductionism, or biologism’, a pejorative term indicating the ideology of the deterministic application of biological findings to society. To make things more problematic, biologism has one reminder, Robert Ardrey, successful science-writer of stories of killer-ape human ancestors, very popular between the 1960s and the 1970s. Giants of the real history of biology, in contrast, such as August Weismann, or Theodosius Dobzhansky, are not even considered. And it is actually very difficult to imagine that Ardrey’s speculation was somehow more relevant to the sociological imagination thanWeismann’s displacement of Lamarckism, or Dobzhansky’s populational rethinking of race with its massive impact on post-1945 social sciences. We begin on this admittedly somewhat polemical note not to start a further fire on the already troubled sociology/biology border. So many wars have already been fought, somuch hostility has already been displayed that we really don’t feel the need. Rather, in introducing this collection dedicated to Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century we wanted to bring to focus at the outset something that seems to us one of the very sources of so many problems, namely: What do sociologists think of when they say the word ‘biology’ both as a way of conceiving vital processes (life as such in its manifold dynamics) and as a form of expert knowledge (biology as an academic discipline)? Furthermore, who do they cite as examples if not exemplars of this biology in question? As sociologists we have been rightly concerned at the caricatured view of the social that some biologists and evolutionary thinkers have put forward over more than a century. There is a long tradition of misrepresentations in conceptualizing the social and social sciences from Galton to Pinker. But have ‘we’ really done any better ourselves? Or have we shown similar tendencies towards caricature, lack of interest, and diffidence? To understand both diffidence and lack of attention amongst sociologists, we believe, historical and sociological explanations, rather than moralistic or

Looking for weak ties: using a mixed methods approach to capture elusive connections

Abstract: Since Granovetter's path breaking work in the 1970s, there has been much discussion about the relevance of weak ties in finding new jobs and generally getting ahead in society. Subsequent research has found evidence to both support and challenge his original theory. However, concerns have also been expressed about the meaning of this concept. What exactly are ‘weak ties’, how are they created and what resources flow through them? In my previous work, I have distinguished between horizontal and vertical ties and the relationships and resources available within them. This paper goes further; drawing on new, mixed methods research with Polish migrants, I explore what types of social ties are useful in contexts of deskilling and finding jobs commensurate with qualifications. Interrogating the concept of ‘weak ties’, I argue that tie strength and ethnic composition are less important than relative social distance and willingness to share valuable resources. I propose that ‘strong ties’ can also act as vertical bridges (or ladders), while ties which are too ‘weak’ may lack necessary trust to share latent resources. I consider the importance of a temporal perspective to explore the dynamism and life cycle of ties over time – as some lapse while others strengthen.

Conflicts in the Habitus: The Emotional Work of Becoming Modern:

Abstract: This article argues that Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and, in particular, the way habitus is transmitted intergenerationally, can be enhanced by considering conflictual conscious and unconscious processes that emerge in relationships. We suggest that Christopher Bollas's discussions of the ‘unthought known’ and of ‘transformational objects’ add relational depth to the concept of habitus and thus contribute to developing a more psycho-social understanding of the relation between agency and change. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a socially mobile chain of a middleclass grandmother, mother and daughter in a period of rapid change, we describe how conflicts in the habitus are produced relationally and can either impede or motivate desires for change. Relational and object relational psychoanalytic theories offer a way to move beyond what we consider a problem in Bourdieu's theory of habitus that derives from his assumption of a subject who either consciously opts for change in habitus when faced with n...

Fielding supranationalism: the European Central Bank as a field effect

Abstract: The European Central Bank (ECB), like all European institutions, poses basic problems of definition and comparability. Mobilizing Bourdieusian field theory (BFT) to resolve them, we map out the ECB...

Unity and Fragmentation of the Habitus

Abstract: This paper examines a unitary notion of the habitus present in Bourdieu's early works and its transformation along his sociological career, to later conceptions of a fragmented habitus concept to examine contemporary relationality and social change. The career of the concept of habitus in Bourdieu shows that interplays of habitus and fields are seen to demand increasing labour of integration from individuals as social life becomes more differentiated. The paper claims the need for sociology to engage with field analyses to advance explorations of the habitus and to acknowledge the potential pliability of the concept. It is suggested that sociology may adopt the psychoanalytic notion of ‘standing in spaces’ (and associated notions of ‘liminality’ and experiences in interstitial positons) for a productive development of the notion of fragmented habitus, and to enhance proposals that view the social with a history that is made available to humans to change.

Habitus: beyond Sociology:

Abstract: This paper presents a contribution of a set of interrelated innovative thinking to revitalize the sociological understanding of the notion of the habitus. It discusses contributions by sociologists exploring the sources of Bourdieu's inspiration from psychology and psychoanalysis to the development of the concept, and brings in new thinking inspired by authors and frameworks that branch out of sociology to bring into sociology fresher thinking. Three areas of concern about habitus are focused on: firstly, the objectivism and subjectivism dichotomy; secondly, the plasticity or rigidity of the concept; and thirdly, the implications of intangibles attached to the notion. The paper introduces a Special Section including five articles on theoretical and empirical explorations bringing exciting perspectives to creative and critical sociology.

The social as signal in the body of chromatin

Abstract: Human social interactions and material cultures are increasingly understood as biologically consequent environmental signals. Within the explanatory framework of epigenetics, such signals become bi...

The ‘proper’ way to spread ideas through social media: exploring the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as perceived by Italian activists

Abstract: Social media have become a relevant arena for different forms of civic engagement and activism. This article focuses on the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as they a...

Affective practices, care and bioscience: a study of two laboratories

Abstract: Scientific knowledge-making is not just a matter of experiments, modelling and fieldwork. It also involves affective, embodied and material practices (Wetherell, 2012) which can be understood together as ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). In this paper we explore how affect spans and connects material, subjective and organizational practices, focusing in particular on the patterns of care we encountered in an observational study of two bioscience laboratories. We explore the preferred emotional subjectivities of each lab and their relation to material practice. We go on to consider flows and clots in the circulation of affect and their relation to care through an exploration of belonging and humour in the labs. We show how being a successful scientist or group of researchers involves a careful choreography of affect in relation to materials, colleagues and others to produce scientific results, subjects and workplaces. We end by considering how thinking with care troubles dominant constructions of scientific practice, successful scientific selves and collectives.

Brave new brains: sociology, family and the politics of knowledge

Abstract: This article critically explores sociological arguments for greater biosocial synthesis, centring contemporary developments in public policy to demonstrate how such a reframing of humanity tends to reinforce existing political orders and socially patterned normativities. The case for further amalgamation of the social and life sciences is examined to suggest that production of somatic markers of truth from relational encounters largely relies upon an anaemic and politically contained version of the social as acquired in early childhood. More specifically, the gendered, classed and culturally specific practice of parenting children has come to occupy a new significance in accounts of social brains and environmentally reactive genomes. This is highlighted through a discussion of ‘early intervention’ as a heavily biologized policy rationale framing opportunities for biosocial collaboration. It is argued that late capitalist objectives of personal investment and optimization are driving this assimilation of the social and life sciences, pursuing an agenda that traces and re-scores long-standing social divisions in the name of progress.

Gender‐based violence and young homeless women: femininity, embodiment and vicarious physical capital

Abstract: This article discusses how the gender-based violence of homelessness contributes to young women engaging in bodily alliances with men as a strategy for physical protection. The embedding of individualized and postfeminist discourses through the conditions of neoliberalism and the structural disadvantage of homelessness have meant that young women are required to adopt self-regulatory practices and take personal responsibility for their physical safety. Drawing on Bourdieu's social capital theory and its development by Skeggs and Shilling, and based on qualitative research undertaken with fifteen young women who had experienced homelessness in Australia, I suggest that feminine capital is mobilized through necessity by young homeless women through the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships with men to access a sense of safety in an environment that is hostile to the female body. However, as the narratives presented here demonstrate, the value and privilege ascribed to (certain) male bodies is only accessible vicariously to young women, it is inherently precarious, it can undermine access to other types of capital and these intimate relationships can also be a source of gender-based violence.

Social Fields, Subfields and Social Spaces at the Scale of Empires: Explaining the Colonial State and Colonial Sociology:

Abstract: This article develops a series of arguments about social fields, subfields, and social spaces that can help us understand empires and colonies. First, we have to assume that the scale of fields is ...

Living well in the Neuropolis

Abstract: This paper is about the relationship between cities and brains: it charts the back-and-forth between the hectic, stressful lives of urban citizens, and a psychological and neurobiological literature that claims to make such stress both visible and knowable. But beyond such genealogical labour, the paper also asks: what can a sociology concerned with the effects of ‘biosocial’ agencies take from a scientific literature on the urban brain? What might sociology even contribute to that literature, in its turn? To investigate these possibilities, the paper centres on the emergence and description of what it calls ‘the Neuropolis’ – a term it deploys to hold together both an intellectual and scientific figure and a real, physical enclosure. The Neuropolis is an image of the city embedded in neuropsychological concepts and histories, but it also describes an embodied set of (sometimes pathological) relations and effects that take places between cities and the people who live in them. At the heart of the paper is an argument that finding a way to thread these phenomena together might open up new paths for thinking about ‘good’ life in the contemporary city. Pushing at this claim, the paper argues that mapping the relations, histories, spaces, and people held together by this term is a vital task for the future of urban sociology.

Work(ing) Dynamics of Migrant Networking among Poles Employed in Hospitality and Food Production

Abstract: Recent studies of migrants provide us with an understanding of their social relations beyond work; however, workplace networking practices among migrants, particularly as they are mediated by their...

Animals and anomalies: an analysis of the UK veterinary profession and the relative lack of state reform

Abstract: The sociology of professions literature would predict that the contemporary state would not allow groups to continue unregulated or unreformed. However, this is indeed the case with the UK veterinary profession, with legislation dating back to 1966. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of published literature and reports, this paper assesses whether wider social, political and ethical dynamics can better explain this intriguing anomaly. We conclude with critical implications for the sociology of the professions. Furthermore, we argue that continuing to ignore the veterinary profession, and animals more generally, in sociological research will result in an impoverished and partial understanding of contemporary healthcare and occupations.

Charitable giving and lay morality: understanding sympathy, moral evaluations and social positions

Abstract: This paper examines how charitable giving offers an example of lay morality, reflecting people's capacity for fellow-feeling, moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral nor...

Epistemic modesty, ostentatiousness and the uncertainties of epigenetics: on the knowledge machinery of (social) science

Abstract: Epigenetic processes are garnering attention in the social sciences, where some scholars assert their importance for theorizing social life. I engage with such ideas here by drawing on interviews with leading bioscientists. To begin with, I underscore the (productive) uncertainties of those working in and around epigenetics; I describe these as a manifestation of ‘epistemic modesty’, and suggest that dissensus helps to propel biomedical innovation. Then, drawing on the concept of ‘alien science’, I detail some researchers’ ambivalences regarding the notion of ‘transgenerational inheritance’; their dissatisfaction with the (public) communication practices of other scientists (situated in what I term a regime of ‘epistemic ostentatiousness’); and the challenges faced when moderating societal discussion of epigenetics in ways that expand excitement whilst deflating (what researchers regard as) unrealistic expectations. The paper concludes with reflections on the knowledge machinery of the (social) sciences, and employs the study data to interrogate sociological engagements with epigenetics.

Unstable bodies: biosocial perspectives on human variation

Abstract: Biological and physical anthropologists have tended to see the study of human variation and the material body as the defining elements of their subdiscipline(s). Generally, sociologists and social ...

Being in community: re‐visioning Sociology

Abstract: This special issue started life as a seminar organized under the auspices of the Sociological Review. Entitled ‘Towards a Micro-sociality of Austerity: Community and Possibilities for Localism’, it was held in Cardiff in April 2014. Its aim was to rethink social scientific approaches to community. By making sociality and being-ness the centre of an approach to community, this special issue seeks to ask what it would mean to rethink our approach to community and in the process imagine a social sciences where community was both the key term and starting point. This rethinking owes a great deal to the work of David Studdert, who has consistently sought to challenge existing conceptualizations of, and approaches to, community (Studdert, 2006; Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016). In critiquing what he calls ‘the state/individual axis’, Studdert has proposed a rethinking of community through a re-emphasis on the communal, that is the action of communing, and through this, upon relationality and sociality as primary for social analysis. At first, he described this as micro-sociality (Studdert, 2006), but it was agreed that this begged the question of the macro and thus this was dropped in favour of an understanding of sociality as primary. Given that this was the term in use during the seminar, this term is referred to by many of the contributors to this issue. It is important also to mention the context of the renewed interest in and funding of community research within the UK in recent years. The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities Programme championed and funded research across the arts, humanities and social sciences, focusing on communities. At one point in the programme, they also championed research co-produced with communities, which they called ‘co design and co-creation’, a very bold step for an academically oriented research council. Several of the authors in this special issue had research funded in this way or in ways related to it. In creating this programme, the AHRC made new kinds of research innovation in relation to community, possible.

‘Regenerating community’? Urban change and narratives of the past

Abstract: This paper explores how understandings of community and belonging have shifted in relation to rapid deindustrialization and subsequent waves of redevelopment in East Manchester. Drawing on ethnogra...

From Society to Tribal Communities

Abstract: Between the 18th and the 20th centuries, modernity was built on rationalism, individualism (the individual seen as a unit) and on the social contract of the Republic, united and indivisible. The mo...