British Journal of Sociology最新文献

{"title":"Methodological Challenges in Studying Wealthy Families.","authors":"Annette Lareau","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70124","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Studying the wealthy is not easy. This piece provides suggestions for recruitment, interview strategies, and design to gain high-quality data on wealthy people. It is based on an interview study of 81 US racially-diverse families with a median net worth of $25 million. First, to gain access to the wealthy, it is key for the researcher to use a wide array of social networks, particularly weak ties, by asking acquaintances if they can mention the study to a potential respondent, and making the first request very small (such as a brief phone call) rather than large (a two-hour interview). Second, rather than standardization of the interview protocol, flexibility is invaluable along with early \"safe\" questions about money (i.e., salary of a first job) for gaining concrete information about family wealth. Third, designing a study to include multiple members of the same family can improve data quality by adding depth, nuance, and confidence in the findings.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148007465","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":"Unequal Family Ties, Wealth Transmission and Social Mobility Among Congolese Traders in Kinshasa.","authors":"Héritier Mesa, Joël Noret","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70132","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.70132","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese traders operating in Kinshasa's urban economy, this article examines how differentiated family ties and wealth transmission shape social mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of inequality. We show that family support is neither uniform nor equally productive: its effects depend on both class position and the specific relationships mobilised. While assistance among siblings and extended kin is widespread, it tends to remain modest and short-lived, supporting entry into trade or crisis management rather than sustained accumulation. By contrast, marital and intergenerational ties more often enable threshold-crossing mobility by providing access to larger volumes of capital, protective connections, and resources for children's education, business developments, and migration trajectories. We argue that these unequal forms of intra-family wealth transmission contribute to the durability of class positions across generations.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147984307","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 Negotiation of Intergenerational Support for Housing: Diverging Patterns Among Renters and Homeowners.","authors":"Quentin Ramond","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70131","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rising housing prices in major Western cities have increased the share of middle-class households living in the private rental sector and heightened the importance of parental financial support in shaping their housing trajectories. Drawing on qualitative interviews carried out with middle-class households aged 30 to 39 in the Paris Metropolitan Area, this paper examines how parental financial support is negotiated among homebuyers and renters and how it affects family relationships. Results indicate striking divergences across housing tenure. Support for homeownership is viewed as a legitimate cause and fosters family bonding, because it is central to middle-class status and facilitates wealth accumulation. Conversely, middle-class renters report feelings of ongoing dependence. This is primarily driven by the nature of support that complicates reciprocation, and the perceived devaluation of middle-class status associated with rental housing. Overall, these findings suggest that representations of tenure, housing expectations and wealth accumulation concerns amid growing economic insecurity help explain why housing tenure shapes middle-class perspectives on parental support. I conclude by highlighting the salience of tenure for understanding the relationship between housing, social class and family relations in the context of welfare state retrenchment and growing middle-class status anxiety.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147984299","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":"More Productive Bodies Faster! Human Capital and Anti-Intellectualism in Danish University Reform.","authors":"Johan Gøtzsche-Astrup, Kaspar Villadsen","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70129","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the current Danish reform of master's programmes as a case of contested marketization in higher education. While the reform aims to produce \"labour-market-relevant\" graduates by shortening degrees, introducing corporate programmes, and reducing enrolment, it reveals a fundamental tension between two competing economic logics: a neoliberal conception of students as human capital and a conventional view of labour as quantifiable work time. The emphasis on the latter by the Danish coalition government, particularly the Social Democrats, parallels their glorification of vocational work and disdain for intellectualism. Drawing on policy documents and public debate, the article shows how these logics coexist uneasily within the reform, combining aspirations to optimize students' individual investment decisions with efforts to increase the aggregate labour supply. The article further analyses the critiques the reform has generated. While traditional critiques emphasize the erosion of universities' role in cultivating democratic citizens, a \"market critique\" emerging from economic actors highlights the reform's failure on its own terms. This critique exposes the limits of centralized planning in engineering labour-market outcomes and points to unintended consequences. Building on this analysis, the article develops the concept of \"impure resistance\" to describe forms of critique that operate within, rather than outside, market rationalities. It argues that such internal critiques can open new avenues for coalition-building in contexts where democratic arguments struggle to resonate, while also underscoring their limitations. The article concludes that effective resistance to marketization must mobilize its internal contradictions rather than oppose it from a single normative standpoint.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147965457","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":"Cruel and Usual: Recursive Racial Cruelty at the US Immigration Courts.","authors":"Nabila N Islam","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70120","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper, I advance a theorization of recursive racial cruelty by focusing on the suffering of racialized respondents in the US immigration courts and connecting it to the routine functioning of the US empire and colonial racial capitalism. Immigration courts operate within the US Department of Justice (DOJ), where immigration judges hear the government's removal (deportation) cases against non-citizen residents and adjudicate their right to stay in the US. As the legal avenue for settling questions of deportation and asylum, these courts are often posed as humane and just alternatives to the spectacular public displays of cruelty involving militarized raids, abductions, and expedited deportations (sometimes to third-country prisons) that have characterized Trump's two terms in office. Using ethnographic data from 42 cases in Boston from 2020-2022, which took place during both Trump and Biden's presidential terms, I argue that the immigration courts are in fact a parallel public-facing vehicle and staging ground for racial cruelty for the US empire-state. In the immigration courts, a combination of de jure and de facto practices work daily to reinforce a racialized politics of imperial membership. In the process, it also circulates money out of the hands of racialized respondents and their families, so that eventually profit can be made. Furthermore, the racial cruelty exercised in the immigration courts, is recursive in two ways. For each immigrant respondent, such cruelty recurs and builds in every stage of the court proceedings, from the initial hearing to the adjudication of bond to the final deportation order, and through their everyday experience in proximate institutions such as detention centers. As a result of the ongoing effects of US (and more broadly, Euro-American) imperialism in much of the world, racial cruelty also recurs generationally and sometimes transnationally during immigrant respondents' lifetimes. By advancing a theory of recursive racial cruelty, this article contributes to decolonial theory building and bridges sociological literature on US immigration, race, organizations, empire, and political economy.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147788837","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 Politics of Knowledge: Race, Decolonial Knowledge, and Activist Research in Belgium and the UK.","authors":"Elif Lootens","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70116","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147629273","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":"When Universities Turn Carceral: Between Academic Freedom and Elimination.","authors":"Gil Rothschild Elyassi","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70103","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147488406","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":"On Medical Domination","authors":"Raphaël Perrin","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70057","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.70057","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, I propose and define the concept of medical domination by combining insights from political sociology, Bourdieu's theory of domination, and intersectional perspectives. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study of abortion services in France, I analyse how a set of legitimised and institutionalised power practices shape access to care despite growing emphasis on patient autonomy. This conceptualisation helps explain disparities in healthcare access and quality, showing how medical interactions reproduce social hierarchies beyond the clinical setting. The paper contributes to political sociology of health by examining both structural foundations of medical power and the socialisation processes through which professionals learn to exercise authority and patients learn to submit to it.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"77 2","pages":"189-200"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12950202/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145379955","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":"Entrepreneuring Legitimacy: A Case Study of the Cultural Codes and Boundary-Makings of the Tech Elite","authors":"Robert Dorschel","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70046","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>How do those who are pulling away economically justify their advantageous positions? This issue has acquired salience in the context of rising inequalities and propelled a reflourishing of sociological analysis focused on elites. This article contributes to this literature by enquiring into the status legitimations and interconnected boundary-makings of one particular elite fraction: the tech elite. Even though this grouping is at the forefront of a transformation of the field of power, it remains surprisingly underexplored in the social sciences. To address this lacuna, this study undertakes a case study of the prominent startup accelerator ‘Y Combinator’ (YC). This accelerator, which has been shaped by Sam Altman and other leading figures in the US tech industry, not only invests financially in startups but also seeks to provide mentorship and expertise to aspiring founders. The article analyses the latter cultural activities by drawing on interviews, lectures, essays, and blogs from the YC online library. Based on qualitative analysis, three central codification principles are reconstructed from the data. Firstly, successful tech entrepreneurs are treated as <i>missionary selves,</i> a quasi-religious framing which goes hand-in-hand with moral boundaries vis-à-vis actors who are deemed materialist and risk-averse. Secondly, the discourse imagines the ideal tech entrepreneur as <i>talented rather than just hardworking</i>. This creates a cultural boundary which operates within the logic of merit-scarcity and thereby serves to legitimate extreme inequalities and the winner-takes-most markets that dominate the tech industry. Thirdly, tech entrepreneurs are construed as <i>fulfillers of real-world needs of the masses</i>. This framing counters public criticisms levelled at tech and echoes the rhetoric of populist political actors, while also allowing to establish moral boundaries vis-à-vis other elite fractions, such as finance. Finally, the article discusses the reconstructed codifications and boundary-makings in relation to data on the socio-structural positions of actors within the startup accelerator.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"77 2","pages":"358-371"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146087245","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 Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism, By Isabelle Guerin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian., Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2023. 229 PP. $ (paperback). ISBN: 978-1-50-363690-3","authors":"Fiona Allon","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.70074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70074","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"77 2","pages":"403-406"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147637078","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}