British Journal of Sociology最新文献

{"title":"Do as I Say, Not as I Do: Exploring the Links Between Parenting Styles, Parental Aspirations, and Socioeconomic Status, and Young People's Post-School Aspirations in Scotland.","authors":"Hannah Glover, Valeria Skafida, Elke Heins","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70183","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is limited population level empirical evidence examining the relationship between social class and post-school aspirations in Scotland, and previous research elsewhere finds conflicting results. Without knowledge of the relationship between social class and post-school aspirations, it is difficult to confirm whether social stratification in post-school destinations is a result of structural barriers, or the dubious prospect that disadvantaged young people simply lack education or career ambitions. To address this gap, this study explores how parenting styles, parental aspirations for their child's education, and parental socioeconomic status are correlated with young people's post-school aspirations in Scotland, using Growing Up in Scotland, a nationally representative longitudinal Scottish birth cohort study. We use three related multinomial logistic regression models to examine whether and how parenting styles, parental aspirations, and parental social class variables explain young people's post-school aspirations. We find that parenting styles are not associated with young people's post-school aspirations when controlling for confounders. Parental aspirations are, however, strongly associated with children's own post-school aspirations when controlling for confounders, and measures of social class are only associated with young people's aspirations when not controlling for these parental aspirations. While young people from all social classes and their parents hold similar aspirations-most commonly to attend university-analysis by the Scottish Government of their administrative statistics reveals that university access is very much socially stratified. This social stratification in outcomes-but not in aspirations-highlights the need to address structural barriers that impede working-class young people from achieving their goals, and the need to shift away from policy solutions that aim to solely raise the ambitions of disadvantaged youths. This study highlights the importance of productively involving parents in career guidance and calls for further research to understand the dynamics of parental and child aspirations better.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149197550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Temporal Structuration: Negotiating Reproductive Timing in Urban China.","authors":"Xijia You","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70185","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article develops the concept of temporal structuration to explain how actors engage temporal norms as social structures. Based on 64 life story interviews in Shenzhen and analysed through constructivist grounded theory, it examines reproductive timing in urban China, where marriage and childbearing are organised by a dense timetable enforced through kin relations. The analysis identifies a situated repertoire of four types of strategy: accommodation, transformation, redirection and identity-based claims, which participants combined and redeployed as relationships, pressures and available resources changed. The strategies act upon the norm's enforcement, justification, operating conditions and applicability, respectively, while drawing on the categories and relationships that sustain it. Postponement thus emerges as a relational accomplishment, maintained through practical, justificatory, identity and emotion work. Temporal structuration thus captures the recursive process through which actors secure room for alternative timing while reproducing-and potentially, through collective accumulation, altering-the norm's authority and operation. This article therefore extends the temporal dimension of structure and agency, advances the empirical understanding of temporal agency, and enriches the processual understanding of temporal experience.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149185952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Symbolic Organisation of Political Antagonism: An Integrative Model of Cultural and Social Polarisation.","authors":"Werner Binder, Matthias Revers, Marcus Morgan, María Luengo","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70180","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.70180","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article develops a cultural and relational model of political polarisation that integrates insights from currently disconnected streams of scholarship to conceive polarisation as a discursive and performative struggle over sacred meanings. Rather than treating polarisation as mere attitudinal divergence, we frame it as the symbolic organization of political antagonism. We identify three interrelated cultural dimensions and one social dimension. These are (1) ideological divergence as bifurcating responses to contested issues, conceptualized as morally and emotionally charged signifiers; (2) the ideological consistency of these divergent issues, enabling chains of signification held together by what we call 'linking signifiers' that mark group identity; (3) the mutual constitution of opposing semiotic chains and identities, which describes how antagonistic groups performatively mobilise opposing discourses to co-constitutively define themselves in relation to one another; and (4) social polarisation, which is based in for example, inequalities, segregations, or violent conflicts. We then present a pathway model which expresses how cultural and social polarisation drive or diminish one another over time. This model thereby offers a sociological theory of polarisation and depolarisation as interlinked processes rather than as separate phenomena requiring separate theories. This paper also maps out the implications of our model for empirical polarisation and depolarisation research.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149166807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Continuity and Distinction of Wealth Elites in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Mapping the Social Space of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.","authors":"Aroop Chatterjee, Comfort Molefinyana","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70173","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article provides the first systematic mapping of wealth elites on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), using original data on individuals linked to significant shareholding entities rather than corporate executives. Through Multiple Correspondence Analysis and cluster analysis, we identify four elite formations shaped by race, gender, age, education, directorship networks and shareholder type. The results challenge accounts of elite diversification by showing the continued centrality of incumbent white male elites in key ownership structures. New Black and female entrants are incorporated into elite spaces, but largely through transformation-linked entities, public-sector ties, business-school credentials and dense directorship networks. The article contributes methodological and conceptual tools for analysing elite formation through ownership, particularly in post-apartheid and post-authoritarian contexts. It advances elite research by foregrounding ownership, organisational form and financial power as central to understanding inequality and elite reproduction in the Global South.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149129235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Worrying Expertise: Representation and Expert Knowledge in Trade Unions.","authors":"Staffan Edling","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70182","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Studies of professionalisation, oligarchy and expertise have asked how expertise affects democratic representation in professionalised membership organisations. This article approaches that problem from the other direction by examining the role of representation in the production of expert knowledge. Drawing on interviews, participant observation and document analysis at LO, the Swedish confederation of blue-collar trade unions, I argue that union researchers build expertise through representation. Researchers claim an epistemic standpoint-by-proxy through representative mandates, and experiential knowledge is treated as an epistemic resource accessible through the representative apparatus of the organisation. The case complicates accounts that treat expertise and representation as independent or opposed: expert staff can incorporate representation into their work rather than act upon it as an external force. This suggests that whether expertise displaces or facilitates member influence depends partly on whether and how representation enters their work.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149129184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Promoting Precarity or Creating Cushions? Examining Canadians' Experiences With Financialization and Insecurity Across the Life Course.","authors":"Michelle Maroto, Guillaume Durou, Samuel Braden, Andrea DeKeseredy","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70181","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examines experiences and perceptions of economic insecurity across individual social trajectories within the context of pervasive financialization in Canada. Drawing on a comprehensive pan-Canadian survey (n = 7483) and set of interviews (n = 127) collected as part of the Great Canadian Class Study (GCCS), we use a mixed-methods approach to explore how inflation, the housing crisis, and labor market precarity combined with the expansion of consumer credit, student loans, and mortgage debt shape people's immediate experiences with insecurity and their perceptions of future insecurity. Although insecurity was pervasive across respondents with many reporting heightened stress about financial futures and increased reliance on credit mechanisms, the experiences and perceptions of insecurity varied across the life course. Older adults over age 65 tended to be the most secure, in part due to being retired homeowners with savings. Younger adults experienced greater insecurity, especially when they were unemployed, held stressful amounts of debt, or were priced out of home ownership opportunities. Qualitative findings both confirmed and contradicted these results. In addition to illustrating how renting and debt promoted precarity for young adults, and highlighting how home ownership and personal safety nets often created cushions for respondents, qualitative findings also pointed toward conflicting situations that included the need for family supports and the limitations of home ownership and savings in periods of inflation.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149118243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Family Wealth and Wellbeing: The Unequal Distribution of Security Across the Life Course.","authors":"Megan Brodie, Brendan Churchill","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70176","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Wealth inequality is rising in Australia just as the country enters a period of substantial intergenerational wealth transfer. While wealth is known to be linked to health and wellbeing, we know less about whether parents' wealth continues to matter for wellbeing across adulthood, and through which mechanisms it operates. Using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this article examines associations between parental wealth and four domains of wellbeing (general health, mental health, life satisfaction, and financial wellbeing) among adults aged 25 to 50 (n = 1039). Linear regression models show that higher parental wealth is associated with better general health and higher financial wellbeing, even after accounting for respondents' own income, wealth, and other characteristics. Part of this relationship operates through homeownership, pointing to housing security as a key pathway linking family resources to wellbeing in mid-adulthood. By contrast, receiving financial help from parents is associated with lower contemporaneous wellbeing and strengthens the estimated parental-wealth gradient. This pattern suggests that transfers often function as responsive support during periods of hardship, rather than simply conferring advantage. Overall, the findings highlight intergenerational inequality as an adulthood-spanning, relational process, and underscore the growing role of family wealth in sustaining wellbeing amid housing insecurity and welfare retrenchment.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149118292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Racialised Conditional Capital Conversion: Race, Class and the Limits of Recognition in Elite Organisations.","authors":"Christine Han, Mustafa F Özbilgin, Dimitria Groutsis, Betina Szkudlarek","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70177","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines how racial inequality persists within organisations alongside career advancement among racialised professionals. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty Chinese professionals in Australia's Big Four firms, we examine how race shapes the recognition and conversion of economic, cultural and social capital in White-dominant organisations. Participants possessed substantial resources that enabled entry, mobility and strategic action, yet those resources did not convert on equivalent terms. Their capital could be dismissed, discounted or confined. We conceptualise this process as racialised conditional capital conversion and identify five mechanisms operating across micro, meso and macro levels. The analysis shows that racialisation need not prevent capital conversion or professional advancement altogether. Instead, it can shape the rates, routes and limits through which capital is recognised and valued. By theorising conditional conversion, the study extends Bourdieusian accounts of capital and explains how mobility and racial inequality can coexist within elite organisations.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149118252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Power of Inter-Chapter Distance: Shaping Social Movement Networks in Extinction Rebellion Australia.","authors":"Peter Gardner, Tiago Carvalho, Thomas O'Brien, Erin Rose Newman-Grigg","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70178","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines how distance impacts the network of connections across social movement organisations. Much of the social movements research on scale and spatiality has focused on micro (the immediate vicinity in protest events) and macro levels (local-global connections), with limited attention paid to the role played by distance in shaping networks across a single country context. To examine this phenomenon, we analyse Extinction Rebellion Australia: an environmental social movement organisation that diffused from the densely populated and spatially compact UK to Australia, with its geographically concentrated populations separated by large distances. Building on Davis' power of distance framework, this paper introduces the power of inter-chapter distance: a framework wherein physical, institutional, cultural, and class-based distances shape network connections within social movements. Our network analysis revealed four network archetypes: a bridge-rich core spans the eastern coast from Melbourne to Brisbane, while affinity-clustered, chapter-centred, and bifurcated systems are found elsewhere in the country. A thematic analysis then draws on rich qualitative data to discuss how inter-chapter distances impact the character of mobilisation in Extinction Rebellion Australia.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149118267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Parenting as Civic Action: A Relational Framework for Citizenship.","authors":"Lauren Erdreich, Einat Gilboa-Oppenheim, Lea Taragin-Zeller, Tanya Zion-Waldoks","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70175","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article conceptualizes parenting as a form of civic action. Identifying a relational turn in theories of citizenship, we propose an analytical framework for examining civic meanings in everyday parental acts. Foregrounding the intersubjective and intergenerational nature of state-citizen relations, the framework expands existing theories to account for parental actions that are not readily recognized as political. Moving beyond a predominant focus on parents at the margins of civic life, we incorporate both privileged and shifting positionalities to capture multiple forms of civic parental action. The model outlines six dimensions for further study: how positionality shapes citizenship; visions of childhood, parenting, and state roles; trajectories into adulthood; parental views of the state; conceptions of the common good; and forms of civic action. We argue that citizenship is shaped through a broad range of everyday parental actions and call on scholars to use this theoretical toolkit to better understand state-citizen relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149065953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}