British Journal of Sociology最新文献

{"title":"Does Proactivity Affect Insurance Solidarity and Individual Responsibility?","authors":"Alberto Cevolini, Elena Esposito","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13230","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the past 20 years, the insurance industry has been experimenting with technological innovations that deeply affect its business model and social function. This article explores the use of digital technologies to monitor policyholders' behaviour and personalise their insurance coverage. Information extracted from behavioural data can be used to produce individualised predictions and design proactive insurance policies, which aim to prompt policyholders to act on the possibility of future damages before they happen. This innovation could bring many benefits in terms of efficiency (improving loss ratio) and foresight (improving risk assessment), but also a renewed focus on individual responsibility for losses. As a consequence, we argue, the collective management of future uncertainty could be undermined, jeopardising the insurance solidarity that makes mutual protection viable.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144112664","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":"(Dis)trust in Digital Insurance: How Datafied Practices Shift Uncertainties and Reconfigure Trust Relations.","authors":"Maiju Tanninen, Gert Meyers","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13223","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Trust is both a prerequisite and a product of insurance, as insurance contracts are built on and create trust relations that enable a risk-averse perspective towards the future. At the same time, insurer-policyholder relationships are characterised by a persistent distrust, rooted in insurance economics and industry reputation. In this article, we discuss these dynamics through a Luhmannian understanding of (dis)trust as a complexity-reducing functional fiction resulting from social action. Beyond traditional insurance, we examine how trust relations are reconfigured by the introduction of digital technologies and data, developments that could enable new ways to calculate, price and manage risks. We critically assess the claim that these techniques make the future knowable and mitigate-or even eliminate-'the unreliable human factor', ultimately replacing trust relations with a principle of transparency. Drawing on sociology of insurance, critical data studies, and our own case-based research on digital insurance products marketed to individuals, we argue that these technologies do not eliminate uncertainties and vulnerabilities as expected in insurance discourse. Instead, they introduce new insecurities and complexities by increasing the trust relations required for insurance arrangements. Consequently, the principle of transparency offers a narrow, techno-solutionist substitute for trust, ignoring the affective aspects of insurer-policyholder relationships and potentially undermining the social contract and solidarity associated with insurance.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144095571","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":"Racial Health Equity and the Question of Black (Non?) Being: Exploring the Uses of Afropessimism in Approaches to Anti-Racist Health Promotion","authors":"Tanisha Spratt","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13232","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13232","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Afropessimism is a critical framework that is often used to analyse anti-Black violence and its deep entrenchment within systems and structures that perpetuate Black subjugation. By conceptualising Black life as ‘non-life’, afropessimism examines how anti-Black violence shapes health disparities, influencing who is deemed worthy of care and underscoring the systemic nature of this (d)evaluation. This framework holds significant potential for anti-racist efforts that aim to address Black health disparities by exposing their root causes. However, afropessimism's central claim—that Black people are not only excluded from the category of the ‘human’ but are also positioned as its antithesis—poses challenges for anti-racist strategies focussed on affirming recognitions of Black humanity to achieve health equity. This paper critically investigates the role of afropessimism in anti-racist health promotion by examining divergent perspectives within its schools of thought. While all scholars who use afropessimist frameworks critically interrogate the systemic inequities that harm Black populations, they differ in their views on the potential for Black life within and beyond current anti-Black systems and structures. These differences lead to varying implications for advancing anti-racist health initiatives and promoting health justice through afropessimism. By analysing how afropessimism may inform anti-racist health frameworks, this paper explores how its distinct theoretical perspectives can enrich, challenge, and constrain efforts to dismantle racial health inequities.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"898-906"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13232","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144095656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945. By Daniel Smith, Manchester: 2023","authors":"Eve Worth","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13227","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"945-946"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144999089","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":"Distancing the Past: Racism as History in South African Schools By Teeger, Chana, New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.","authors":"Berenike Firestone","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13228","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"943-944"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144999134","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":"Review of The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music By Kristina Kolbe, 2024, Manchester University Press, vii + 281 pp., #85 (hardcover), ISBN 9781526165497","authors":"Rafal Zaborowski","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13226","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"941-942"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144999079","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 Role of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Solutions in Transforming Educational and Employment Access for Individuals With Disabilities","authors":"Anis Omri,&nbsp;Sana Slimani,&nbsp;Hatem Afi","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13225","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13225","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>While education is essential for employability, people with disabilities often face barriers such as inadequate accommodations and limited access to adaptive technologies, hindering their equitable labor market participation. This research addresses these challenges by analyzing the roles of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalization in the relationship between educational attainment and employability among people with disabilities in 33 high-income countries from 2010 to 2022. Using a moderated moderation model, the study evaluates how AI and digitalization jointly influence the relationship between education levels and employment outcomes. The analysis employs the Hayes PROCESS macro with bootstrapped confidence intervals to ensure robustness and accuracy in estimating interaction effects. The findings demonstrate that education significantly enhances employment prospects for individuals with disabilities, with stronger effects observed at intermediate and advanced education levels. AI serves as a critical moderator, amplifying the positive impact of education by creating adaptive learning environments and fostering essential technical and transversal skills. Digitalization complements this role by providing the infrastructure necessary to integrate AI into education systems, broadening access to resources, and enabling flexible learning opportunities. The study further identifies a moderated moderation effect, where the combined influence of AI and digitalization significantly strengthens the effect of education on employability for disabled people. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI and digitalization in improving education quality and fostering labor market inclusion for persons with disabilities in an increasingly digitalized world.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"873-897"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144025635","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 Last of England: Banal Nationalism and Communities of Loss in British Pub Closure Media Narratives","authors":"Robert Deakin,&nbsp;Thomas Thurnell-Read","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13220","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13220","url":null,"abstract":"<p>While pubs have long been celebrated as a quintessential part of British culture, the ongoing and increasingly rapid closure of British pubs has raised concerns about the impacts of their loss on the wider cultural life and identity of the nation. The article explores how pub closures are narrated in British print news media through the analysis of a sample of news stories spanning 2000–2023. Time series analysis shows that pub closures have been a steady concern in UK print media, albeit with several notable peaks in coverage aligned to key events impacting the sector. Findings suggest that the causes of pub closure are presented as an economic issue, while the consequences of pub closures are typical framed in social and cultural terms. Using Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’, the article analyses a sub-set of this data to examine how the narratives used to explain pub closures make regular and emotive reference to the nation and associated concepts. Pub closures are therefore presented as a threat to the nation and a loss of national identity. These emotive narratives of loss, we argue, work to homogenise both the idealised pub and the wider national community in a manner which occludes the complexity of both.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"861-872"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13220","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144045629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prestige Fetishism in the Academy: Comte's Mirror, the Magic Mirror or an Illusion of Reality?","authors":"Jian Wu","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13224","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13224","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The call for commentary frames &lt;i&gt;Scholarship as Struggle: Stories of Censorship, Marketisation, and Resistance&lt;/i&gt; as ‘the ongoing managerial and ideological attacks on higher education’ (BJS (British Journal of Sociology) &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;). This assertion is undoubtedly accurate whether viewed through the lens of the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s with its accompanying discourses of new public management or the rule of the market (Olssen and Peters &lt;span&gt;2005&lt;/span&gt;) or of the more recent right-wing populist assault against ‘“liberal elites” [from higher education] in the name of tradition or nation’ (Dillabough &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;, 183). However, this framing is also problematic as it depicts academics as passive victims—erasing their role in participating in, reinforcing, or benefiting from the system, disregarding the internal academic power structures that shape higher education (HE), and externalising resistance as a task that should be directed towards the system rather than serving as a reflection on their professional practice. Take the example of audit culture and the rise of ‘impact’, which, in the UK, is often attributed to the Research Excellence Framework 2014 (Pearce and Evans &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). According to Apple (&lt;span&gt;2005&lt;/span&gt;), these phenomena are not ‘totally reducible to the needs of neo-liberals and neo-conservatives’ (20), and he encourages a more nuanced understanding of class relations and class projects to fully grasp them. However, his class analysis remains confined to the friction between the academic and new managerial classes, overlooking the academic community as a site of class struggle among academics themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bourdieu (&lt;span&gt;2004&lt;/span&gt;, 4) uses the ‘mirror effect’ metaphor to illustrate how reflexivity involves not mere self-awareness but a critical recognition of how one's position within a social hierarchy influences perceptions, behaviours, and academic or professional engagement. Thus, Bourdieu's ‘mirror’ encourages us to closely examine our academic identity and reflect on our own practices. In this spirit, I maintain that, despite the straitjacket of external factors like marketisation imposed on the academy, academics must still scrutinise the extent to which they have—consciously and unconsciously—contributed to the maintenance of ‘the rhythm of the [capitalist] iron system’ (Horkheimer and Adorno &lt;span&gt;1997&lt;/span&gt;, 120).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Based primarily on my experiences, observations, and reflections as a PhD student and later as an academic in the UK, I argue that although grouping people into a set of hierarchical social categories may be inevitable in any organisation, social relations between universities and society at large and among academics appear increasingly defined by the sheer properties and purported values of prestige indicators in the forms of perceived quality, status, and reputation - often measured through rankings, evaluations, and bibliometric indicators (Musselin &lt;spa","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"932-936"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13224","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144060392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Army Deserters in Exile","authors":"Godfrey Maringira","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13222","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13222","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Desertion from the military does not turn soldiers into civilians. In this paper, I analyse military identity and embodied practices of soldiers who deserted from the Zimbabwe National Army and were exiled in South Africa. Soldiering is understood as an essence part of who they are, as men who risked their lives and invested in a career, which they later deserted. These soldiers had a particular sense of a military past which functioned at the discursive level: even though they blamed the military for making them leave the barracks, they thought of themselves as soldiers in a context of exile. The men whose narratives are presented in this paper joined the army in post-independence Zimbabwe, and they did not participate in the country's liberation war against the British. These men have a different understanding of themselves as soldiers to those who fought in the liberation war. Their sense of themselves, and others in and outside the military is fundamentally drawn from a professional army. As is often noted, the military is greedy in terms of its demands on its members, and consequently it embeds within military personnel lasting practices, ways of being and a sense of a military identity, all of which can be resistant to change, yet simultaneously resilient, even in a context of exile. I therefore suggest that the experience of civilian life alone does little to erode the practices and mind frames of the military ingrained into army deserters even outside the army. This seems to be the case in a number of African societies where military desertion is prevalent, especially in authoritarian regimes.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":"851-860"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13222","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144044217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}