British Journal of Sociology最新文献

{"title":"Family Life in the Time of COVID: International Perspectives. By Twamley, K., Iqbal, H., Faircloth, C., 2023. London: UCL Press. 328 pages, ISBN: 9781800081741","authors":"Rosalind Edwards","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13085","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13085","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"369-371"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139775360","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":"In defence of sociological description: A ‘world-making’ perspective","authors":"Mike Savage","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13083","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13083","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I am pleased to contribute to the long-standing debate about the relationship between descriptive and causal strategies in sociology. This familiar question goes to the heart of understanding the purpose of social science itself and forces us to think through, at a fundamental level, what we are trying to achieve. My aim here is not criticise causal analysis as such, which undoubtedly has a vital role to play, but to defend descriptive sociology for two linked reasons. Firstly, strategically, in the early 21<sup>st</sup> century, descriptive social science has great public as well as academic resonance. If we exclude descriptive social science from our baggage, we lose vital, critical, contributions to contemporary debate. Secondly, this capacity of descriptive social science comes from its capacity to be ‘world-making’—to open up vistas of wonder, concern, empathy and horror which are vital for renewing the sociological imagination—and for engaging wider publics. Descriptive assemblages open up new worlds to academic and non-academic audiences, shatter older assumptions shattered and disclose new possibilities. Causal analysis, by contrast, is forced to manipulate different pre-defined conditions in order to infer relative causal relations and lacks this world making capacity.</p><p>My unease with the mobilisation of ‘causality’ as superior to ‘description’, is in some ways a gut feeling, tied to Pierre Bourdieu's (<span>2000</span>) critique of the ‘scholastic point of view’. One of my worries when social scientists invoke the primacy of ‘causality’ is that research becomes locked—mostly inadvertently—into an academic politics of closure, in which group of experts winnow better (causal) from worse (descriptive) ways of addressing any given topic. The term ‘descriptive’ is routinely deployed as secondary to the prized ‘causal’, and being able to adjudicate these boundaries ultimately becomes bound up with claims to scholarly excellence—whether this is staged through statistical sophistication, theoretical acumen, political proclivities, or some other way. In this game of academic closure, those who can claim to conduct ‘causal’ analysis become better able to command the high ground of the ‘scholastic point of view’ itself. But following not only Bourdieu but a host of writers who insist on the need to position ourselves from the subaltern point of view, we cannot take this claim at face value—it needs to be exposed as a strategy of empowerment.</p><p>This line of argument means that I do not need to address directly the philosophy of social science, where the analysis of causation has a huge and venerable literature which I can't do justice to here. In fact, for what it is worth, I have always been inspired by critical realism, which to my mind offers a convincing defence of the value of establishing causal relations in a deep and rigorous way. Therefore, I have no interest in challenging causal analysis as such. Rather, my reflections are ro","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"360-365"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13083","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139698889","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":"Articulation, or the persistent problem with explanation","authors":"Noortje Marres","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13084","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13084","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Sociologists have long argued that explanation, as a form of knowledge, has serious limitations when it comes to understanding society. The case against explanation is one of the field's founding ideas, it is literally a foundational idea. It was by rejecting causalist forms of explanation that had been developed in the natural sciences that 19th century scholars and activists that we today call sociologists succeeded in articulating a distinctive realm of reality with relative autonomy from the state, the economy and the family: society (Wagner, <span>2000</span>). Key to their achievement was the argument that the phenomenon of society is fundamentally different from nature. Scientists at the time expected nature to obey eternally valid laws, but society has a number of features that challenge this assumption. Social actors formulate norms and rules to justify their actions and to make sense of social reality. This means that norms and rules themselves may play an active role in the transformation of social reality. Society, in other words, is marked by reflexivity. Of course, a lot has happened since the 19th century and this very notably includes unrelenting efforts by social scientists to create forms of explanation that are capable of taking reflexivity into account. Yet problems with explanation have continued to make themselves felt in the social sciences and humanities. The problem, in a nutshell, is that explanation sets up the relation between social science and its object, society, in terms of <i>representation</i>, but the relation between knowledge about society and social reality is fundamentally an <i>interactive</i> one: the creation of knowledge about society far more often than not involves intervention in society.</p><p>The creation of social scientific knowledge can rarely, if ever, by considered a purely representational affair. This obtains for practically all forms of knowledge about society - and as we shall see, about nature as well - but it causes specific problems for the explanation of social phenomena. Let me give an example from contemporary social science, broadly defined. Some years ago computational social scientists published research that showed that the high levels of political polarization that can be observed among communities on Facebook cannot be explained by the role of social media algorithms in the promotion of content. As they put it: “individual choices, more than algorithms, limit exposure to attitude-challenging content” (Bakshy et al., <span>2015</span>, p. 1131). Such a claim asks us to accept a number of assumptions, most notably, that it is possible to disentangle the influence of individual user choices on news consumption on Facebook from the influence of platform settings such as the structure of news feeds.<sup>1</sup> This assumption may or may not ultimately be methodologically convincing. But in grounding its main finding in this distinction, this study distracts attention from a more ","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"354-359"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13084","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139673585","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":"Agents of reform: Child labor and the origins of the welfare state. By Elisabeth Anderson, Princeton (NJ), Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2021. pp. 384. $32.00/£28.00. ISBN: 978-0-691-22089-5","authors":"Matty R. Lichtenstein","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13082","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13082","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 4","pages":"668-670"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140472967","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":"Symbolic boundary work: Jewish and Arab femicide in Israeli Hebrew newspapers","authors":"Eran Shor,&nbsp;Ina Filkobski","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13080","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13080","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We analyze 391 news reports in Israeli newspapers between 2013 and 2015, covering murders of women and their family members by other family members and intimate partners. We compare articles where the perpetrators and victims are Jewish to those where the perpetrators and victims are Palestinian citizens of Israel (henceforth PCI). We found that articles tend to provide much more details about Jewish culprits than about PCI ones. As for ascribed motives, most murder cases by Jews were framed as an outcome of individual personality or the pathology of the culprit. Conversely, when Palestinian citizens were the killers, culture and tradition were invoked as the main motives. We suggest that the routine work of narration that the Israeli media preform when covering femicide is a case of political use of cultural stereotypes to gain moral ground in the intractable conflict between Jews and Palestinians.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"290-302"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13080","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139576861","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":"Family background consistently affects economic success across the life cycle: A research note on how brother correlations overlap over the life course","authors":"Kristian Bernt Karlson","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13081","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13081","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers’ life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within-family processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"347-353"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13081","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139572020","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":"What do stances on immigrants' welfare entitlement mean? Evidence from a correlational class analysis","authors":"Thijs Lindner,&nbsp;Stijn Daenekindt,&nbsp;Willem de Koster,&nbsp;Jeroen van der Waal","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13078","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13078","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent in-depth qualitative research indicates that different people ascribe different meanings to their apparently similar stances on immigrants' entitlement to welfare. We are the first to investigate such variation quantitatively among the public-at-large, applying the novel method Correlational Class Analysis to an original survey fielded among a representative sample in the Netherlands (<i>n</i> = 2138). We uncover five ways of looking at immigrants' entitlement to welfare, each including both people who oppose that entitlement and those who support it. People who adhere to these different viewpoints substantially differ when it comes to income, education, religious denomination, and political preference. We interpret these unique findings and discuss them in relation to the extant literature on welfare chauvinism. Moreover, uncovering what people's stances regarding immigrants' entitlement to welfare mean not only advances the scholarly debate on welfare chauvinism, but also provides a stepping stone for meaning-oriented sociological research on public opinion more generally.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"271-289"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13078","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139418492","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":"Issue Information - List of Books Reviewed","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13079","url":null,"abstract":"<p>No abstract is available for this article.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 1","pages":"3-4"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13079","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139406982","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":"Is it time sociology started researching incompetence?","authors":"Edmund Chattoe-Brown","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13077","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13077","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There appears to be a mismatch between apparent incompetence in the world and the amount of sociological research it attracts. The aim of this article is to outline a sociology of incompetence and justify its value. I begin by defining incompetence as unsatisfactory performance relative to standards. Incompetence is thus intrinsically sociological in being negotiated and socially (re)constituted. The next section foregrounds how widespread and serious incompetence is. This renders effective sociological understanding crucial to welfare. The article then systematically analyses uses of the term in the <i>British Journal of Sociology</i> (a good quality general journal) to assess the current state of research. This analysis fully confirms the neglect of incompetence as a research topic. The next section proposes suitable methods for preliminary incompetence research addressing distinctive challenges like the stigma of being incompetent. These sections then allow incompetence to be better contextualised by other contributing concepts like power, bureaucracy and meritocracy. The final section justifies suggestions about directions for future research.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 2","pages":"219-231"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13077","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139400858","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":"Social inequality in completion rates in higher education: Heterogeneity in educational fields","authors":"Håvard Helland,&nbsp;Thea B. Strømme","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13075","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13075","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how social disparities in dropout rates vary by educational field. Previous studies have shown that first-generation students, in general, have lower higher education completion rates than their fellow students. Less is known, however, about how such disparities vary between educational fields. We distinguish between <i>general</i> and <i>field specific cultural capital</i> and find that general cultural capital mainly operates through academic preparedness in upper secondary school, and after controlling for upper secondary school grade point average (GPA), students with parents with higher education degrees in a different field than themselves do not complete their degrees more often than first-generation students. More field-specific advantages of having a parent with a similar education are nonetheless visible in many fields also when we compare students with equal grades. Our analyses of Norwegian register data on the entire student population (<i>N</i> ≈ 400,000) show that the social inequalities are largest in fields that are both <i>soft</i> and <i>pure</i>, like humanities and social science, and that in <i>soft</i> and <i>applied</i> educational fields, like teaching and social work, the social differences are small and insignificant after controlling for GPA from upper secondary school. In fields classified as <i>hard</i>, it is only the students with parents with a similar education who complete their initial degree more often than first-generation students. We suggest that status group formation, field-specific cultural capital and micro-class reproduction may all contribute to explaining these patterns.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 2","pages":"201-218"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13075","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139080122","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}