Wiley: The Sociological Review: Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The Sociological Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 1016-1023, November 2016.

Sociality and a proposed analytic1 for investigating communal being‐ness

David Studdert — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This paper thinks about ourselves as communal beings, tied together and created by common actions of sociality. The perspective presented here stems from what Wills (this issue) terms the Aristotelian position that community is always with us, but it tries to move beyond that simple statement, to ask questions, and propose answers to the question of how: how is community always with us?

Embedded in that question of course are others: what are the implications of such an investigation for a discipline tasked to investigate the social? How do we investigate the social of which we are both observer and act-or? What does thinking differently about community mean? What would such a different approach to community look like and finally, how does community work?

To confront these questions the paper proposes an investigative analytic which positions communal being-ness as the source of ontological meaning. It proposes that the ‘who’ we are, our being-ness/identity, is the outcome of constant sociality enacted in common and created and sustained in common through the inter-relational linking of action, materiality, subjectivity, speech and the world of accepted meanings. It proposes a social science means for the investigation of this sociality, this communal being-ness of ours: that is a method for studying the social not built upon concepts borrowed from other fields, but particular to the task at hand. It argues that Hannah Arendt's (1958) account of the creation of our human being-ness as a temporary outcome held in common, provides the foundation for thinking inter-relationally about our communing, and about the social world, to which that thinking must be inexorably bound.

(Re)Locating community in relationships: questions for public policy

Jane Wills — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This paper argues that we should think of community as being about social relationships rather than a ‘thing’ that is ‘lost’, ‘found’ or ‘made’. The paper draws on the philosophy of Roberto Esposito and the sociology of David Studdert to highlight the overlaps in their approaches to community. Both argue that community is ontological, as unavoidably ‘with us’. The paper then draws upon two empirical examples to argue that this approach could enable a different kind of public policy in relation to community. Policy would focus on existing relationships as the starting point for any efforts to effect social change. The implications for contemporary debates about localism are explored at the end of the paper.

Performing the micro‐social: using theatre to debate research findings on everyday life, health and well‐being

Ellie Byrne, Eva Elliott, Gareth Williams — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This paper describes and critically assesses the use and development of a model of participatory theatre to reappropriate the ways in which a place in the deindustrialized south Wales valleys is represented. Neo-liberal policies which focus on individual responsibility, conditionality, sanctions and incentives frame the production of statistics on health inequality and deprivation in particular ways. While ‘place’ can be a resource for expressing positive identities this presents people living in economically under-resourced areas with a problem if that place-based identity is also subject to vilification. In this paper we focus on three objectives: to explore negative stereotypes of a post-industrial community; to describe the methods and process of working alongside local people to offer alternative ways of understanding place; and to discuss the implications of using community theatre for policy and practice. We argue that theatre-based forms of place-making and dialogue can create spaces where policy issues, such as health and well-being, can be discussed in the context of everyday local concerns. Meanings in common are generated in ways that create affective understandings of place and the impact of economic change and crisis (Jones et al., 2013). These co-productive processes are uncertain, emergent, and risky and need to be managed carefully in the context of trustful relations.

Affective history, working‐class communities and self‐determination

Valerie Walkerdine — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Public sociology for an emergent people: the affective gift in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present

Maria Hynes — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

In the face of increasing calls for sociology to demonstrate its public relevance, it is necessary to question cherished understandings of what so-called Public Sociology should look like. This paper advances an understanding of sociology that is ontologically oriented toward a world of rapidly emerging and often unfamiliar social realities, with an eye to producing new ways of understanding the discipline's authority vis a vis ‘the public.’ In experimenting with alternate conceptualisations of sociology, its public and their relation, I turn to a social, and specifically artistic, event for inspiration; namely, Marina Abramović’s performance of The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art. While the artist and the social scientist clearly work with differing possibilities and constraints, the performance indicates a novel way in which authority might be mobilised. Wheras the debate around public sociology normally centres on the figure of the expert, Abramović’s performance give rise to a new authority, intimately bound up with the age old sociological concepts of charisma and the gift. This highly experimental performance points the way toward a more affectively open and productive relationship between author and public.

Not single spies but in battalions: a critical, sociological engagement with the idea of so‐called ‘Troubled Families’

Tracy Shildrick, Robert MacDonald, Andy Furlong — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

Recent political and popular discourses in the UK have drawn upon a range of different concepts and powerful and easily recalled sound bites to describe groups who are disadvantaged and who are portrayed as undeserving. The labelling of disadvantaged groups in negative terms and in order to support punitive policies has a long history and not just in the UK. From the racialized ‘underclass’ discourses popular in the US to the recent discourse around ‘Troubled Families’ in the UK, there is a long tradition of labelling disadvantaged groups in such ways that they are alleged to be poor because of their dysfunctional cultures, anti-social behaviours and destructive family life-styles. Drawing on interviews collected with different generations of deeply disadvantaged families we offer one of the first, empirical, sociological accounts of the problems and troubles that some families can face – over decades and over generations. We use this empirical case study by way of illustrating how these negative discourses successfully pave the way for punitive policy interventions and how they also have implications for how disadvantaged groups are treated and for personal well-being.

Gendering the middle classes: the construction of conductors’ authority in youth classical music groups

Anna Bull — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

While many accounts of gendered embodiment focus on transformation, this article examines how normative gendered identifications are reinforced among middle-class young people playing classical music. Drawing on an ethnographic study of young people in youth orchestras and a youth choir in the south of England, it examines how the authority of the male conductor is constructed and experienced. It explores the construction of the charisma on which this gendered authority is based, through embodied craft, sexualization and humour, showing how conductors cultivated this mode of authority, which relied on the embodied intimacy of classical musical practice. As a consequence of these gendered power dynamics, young women talked about their conductors differently from the young men. Despite the discomfort or resistance that some of the young women voiced in private, they approached rehearsals with a willing trust which gave the public appearance of their consent to his authority. Against the ways in which participants emphasized agency and choice in interviews, observations of rehearsals revealed young people's conformity to this gendered authority. This paper therefore contributes to theorizing gender among the middle classes by demonstrating how the affective power of the conductor in youth classical music ensembles produces conformity.

Formative sociology and ethico‐political imaginaries: opening up transnational responses to Palestine–Israel

Ruth Sheldon — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

Recent contributors to this journal have sought to radicalize sociology by exploring how the discipline might expand political imaginaries and take up non-reductionist notions of everyday ethics. In a related move, sociologists are exploring the performative potential of sociological practices and sensibilities, while anthropologists are reframing the relationship of ethnography to theory. This article contributes to these projects by focusing on an acute case in which an expanded political imaginary is urgently needed; the tensions between political solidarity and ethical violence in transnational communications around Palestine–Israel. Drawing on an ethnographic study of conflicting activist groups in Britain, I highlight a profound ethical problem: that claims for justice appear to entail a violent refusal to acknowledge ‘the other’. The article examines how the dualistic logics structuring sociological imaginaries have occluded and reproduced this impasse, and focuses on an attempt by activists to create non-violent modes of solidarity. Articulating a role for ethnography in opening up this alternative, I show how responsive and creative sociological methods can bring new languages, imaginaries and political formations into being.

Exploring micro‐sociality through the lens of ‘established‐outsider’ figurational dynamics in a South Wales community

Rachel Swann, Gordon Hughes — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of its original publication, this article revisits The Established and the Outsiders, a largely forgotten and in our view unfairly neglected community study by Elias and Scotson (1965). Drawing from our ethnographic research on an urban community in South Wales, the contemporary significance of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis of insider-outsider relations in bounded, household-based communities made by the original work is foregrounded. The findings from our research on ‘Cornerville’ confirms many of the empirically based conceptual claims of Elias and Scotson's earlier diagnosis of largely intra-working class relations, distribution of status honour, and processes of micro-sociality. The article concludes by drawing out some of the implications of community-based research for advancing sociological criminology's contribution to the specific analysis of group stigmatization and more broadly of social processes of communal ordering and informal rule-making and rule-breaking in contemporary localities.

‘Don't show the play at the football ground, nobody will come’: the micro‐sociality of co‐produced research in an English provincial city

Ben Rogaly — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This article examines the idea that community is best understood through the concept of micro-sociality, as a verb, as ongoing social relations in action, rather than a thing to be possessed, lacked or lost. Such an emphasis on already-existing relations has consequences for the conduct of publicly-funded interventions including socially engaged research projects. This article tells a part of the story of one such project in Peterborough, England in the 2010s. If the project was counter-cultural in working with what was already happening in the city, rather than seeking to proselytize a culturally specific view of citizenship and the arts, it also faced its own political choices regarding whose work to accompany and how. Initiated by a group of outsider academics and artists, it involved transformations at varying scales, both fleeting and longer-lasting, often unplanned. The article takes a look at the project's own micro-sociality in the choices city residents made to accompany its intentions and practices. Like other people, university researchers and artists are seen to depend on social relations, including the commitment and care of people they work with.

With a little help from my friends: relational work in leisure‐related enterprising

Erika Andersson Cederholm, Malin Åkerström — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

The present article analyses the indistinct boundaries between formal and informal economic exchanges, with a focus on friendship and work relations. To illustrate these intersections, we present a study of Swedish lifestyle entrepreneurs who run small-scale horse-related enterprises. The specific characteristics of this form of business – in which the horse farm owners/operators, customers, employees and voluntary workers share a leisure interest in horses and participate in the everyday work on the farm – provide the foundation for an economic environment where personal favour exchanges and a gift economy are intertwined with a market economy. Drawing on Viviana Zelizer's notion of ‘relational work’, applied in a context where the gift economy is based on individual leisure interests and leisure-based friendship, the present analysis focuses on how relationships, transactions and forms of repayments are constantly negotiated along a continuum between work-oriented friendship and friendly work relations. The empirical illustrations demonstrate the limitations of the notion of boundary work often employed in studies of relational work – which emphasizes boundary definition. In contrast, it seems that relational work may also involve practices that maintain indistinct boundaries between different types of relationships, thus sustaining tension between a formal and informal economy.

Gender performance and cosmopolitan practice: exploring gendered frames of openness and hospitality

Nina Høy‐Petersen, Ian Woodward, Zlatko Skrbis — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

Critiques of cosmopolitanism theory argue that the concept is premised on implicit assumptions of a masculine global citizen, replete with privileged access to various mobile and symbolic forms of social advantage. In response, empirical accounts of cosmopolitanism have explored the impact of class, education, and ethnicity on cosmopolitan practices. Yet, little direct empirical attention is given to whether and how men and women might differently understand and frame cultural diversity. We argue that to the extent that cosmopolitanism is constituted by social practices, scripts and repertoires of discursive narrativization, it is likely to be navigated and applied through gender-ideologies. Applying the methodological concept of cognitive schema to a set of qualitative data, and focusing on expressions of hospitality towards others within local communities, we inductively assemble evidence to show that men and women have differently articulated cosmopolitan imaginations. In conclusion, we consider what our empirical attention to gender might mean for how we advance critical theories of cosmopolitanism.

Work(ing) dynamics of migrant networking among Poles employed in hospitality and food production

Peter Lugosi, Hania Janta, Barbara Wilczek — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

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 jobs and their working environment, has not been addressed as a substantive subject. Drawing on two studies of Poles, working in hospitality and food production, which utilized interviews, participant observation, netnography and a survey, this paper examines how occupational and organizational factors, including the nature of work and the characteristics of the workplace, impact upon migrants’ intra- and inter-group relations. Furthermore, the data are used to consider how migrants ‘work’ (ie, utilize and exploit) the dynamics of the work(place) to facilitate their networking. We distinguish between task, spatial and related temporal dimensions affecting their interactions, arguing that such a conceptual lens is necessary for understanding migrants’ networking strategies.

The affective work of art: an ethnographic study of Brian Lobel's Fun with Cancer Patients

Cath Lambert — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This article demonstrates the sociological possibilities of using affect. In particular the discussion rises to the methodological challenges posed by affect theories when attempting to undertake empirical research. Drawing on ethnographic data from a study of Brian Lobel's Fun with Cancer Patients art exhibition, it is argued that the development of critically entangled methods, attentive to fleeting, partial, complex and often ‘inaccessible’ knowledge and experiences, is necessary. In Fun with Cancer Patients the aesthetic event offered opportunities for art participants and visitors to engage with different discourses and subjectivities around cancer. An affective lens makes this engagement intelligible. The analysis contributes to ‘live sociology’, demonstrating that developing live methods attentive to affect can provide insight into the political potential of aesthetic encounters.

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

Louise Ryan — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

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.

Do those diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease lose their souls? Whitehead and Stengers on persons, propositions and the soul

Michael Halewood — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

In this article, I use the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Isabelle Stengers to challenge the biomedical and commonsense view that those diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease suffer an irreparable and inevitable loss of self and that this loss is inextricably tied to a decline in linguistic capability which itself bears immediate witness to a deterioration in the brain. Through an analysis of Whitehead's (1933, 1938) provocative conceptualization of the soul, and Stengers' (2005) reading of this, I suggest that it is possible to dislocate language from its supposed position as that which produces and fully expresses human experience. This involves a challenge to the ‘linguistic turn’ as to be found in much contemporary social theory, philosophy and social psychology. The discussion of Whitehead’s (and Stengers') ideas regarding the soul involves a reading of Whitehead's notions of ‘propositions’, ‘contrasts’ and the ‘social environment’. Through these analyses, I seek to relocate the problem of language and identity and its relation to Alzheimer's disease. I go beyond any reduction of the problem either to its social component, where the self is seen as a resolutely human ‘person’, or to its natural element, where Alzheimer's disease is seen solely as a problem located within the brain. Instead, I try to think the natural and social together. My aim is not to explain away the problem but to suggest a more productive way of thinking about those diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and ourselves.

Centuries of sociology in millions of books

Yunsong Chen, Fei Yan — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

The Google Books N-gram corpus contains an enormous volume of digitized data, which, to the best of our knowledge, sociologists have yet to fully utilize. In this paper, we mine this data to shed light on the discipline itself by conducting the first empirical study to map the disciplinary advancement of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century to 2008. We analyse the usage frequency of the most common terms in five major sociology categories: disciplinary advancement, scholars of sociology, theoretical dimensions, fields of sociology, and research methodologies. We also construct an overall index deriving from all sociology-related key words using the principal component method to demonstrate the overall influence of sociology as a discipline. Charting the historical evolution of the examined terms provides rich insights regarding the emergence and development of sociological norms, practices, and boundaries over the past two centuries. This novel application of massive content analysis using data of unprecedented size helps unpack the transformation of sociocultural dynamics over a long-term temporal scale.

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

Camilla Lewis — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

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 ethnographic research, it focuses on two social settings which are under threat of closure – a coffee morning and a market place. In these settings, long-standing residents make community, paradoxically, by sharing narratives about the loss of social ties. Drawing on relational approaches to place, the discussion sheds light on the disruption between place and identity in post-industrial localities which have been reshaped by drastic physical regeneration. The paper argues that in order to understand the apparent contradiction between narratives of social decline and observations of abundant social relations, it is necessary to extend existing sociological and anthropological approaches to community and belonging.

From society to tribal communities

Michel Maffesoli* — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

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 modernist project was to dominate nature and to be universal. The postmodernity which has succeeded it has seen the powerful return of the impulse to community and of the need of collective emotion – I call this neo-tribalism (1988). The plural person, identifying with a number of tribes and elective affinities based on common tastes, is rediscovering the importance of territory (roots) and ‘compagnonnage’ – the passing on of a trade and a craftsman's identity, an initiation rather than an education. It is this nascent postmodernity which I attempt to describe.

Metalworkers’ nostalgic memories and optimistic official representations of a transformed industrial landscape

Lars Meier — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

Official representations of transformed landscapes and people's memories of these landscapes are usually set into a contrast. This article analyses the relationship between workers’ nostalgic memories and an optimistic official representation of a transformed industrial landscape by considering both as elements of social knowledge. This is achieved by analysing official texts and biographic narratives of workers. All too often class is considered as irrelevant, but this article carves out the relevance of class for workers’ memories and their feelings of nostalgia. Against the backdrop of concepts of social knowledge and social memory, this article focuses on the interrelations and demonstrates that official representations leave an imprint on the workers’ emotions that are related to class. Correspondingly, this paper clarifies why the retired workers are so nostalgic even if they climbed the social ladder.

Moral ambivalence and informal care for the dying

Alex Broom, Emma Kirby, Katherine Kenny, John MacArtney, Phillip Good — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

Caring for the dying presents perhaps the most challenging site of informal care. Participation in informal caring roles in such contexts has been prone to reification as a virtuous social practice, often without critical reflection as to the implications for caregivers. Here, drawing on interviews with carers who were providing care in the last few weeks or days of life, we develop an understanding of informal care in this setting as a morally ambiguous social practice, framed by social relations of duty, gift and virtue, but in turn encapsulating experiences of failure, shame and suffering. Such a contradictory understanding of caregiving is critical for understanding the tensions within end-of-life settings and also for countering the concealments produced by the valorization of informal care more broadly in modern societies. We present a critical analysis of informal care's contested character at the end of life, challenging normative understandings that are complicit in producing moral ambivalence, shame and suffering for individual carers.

Introduction to Michel Maffesoli's ‘From society to tribal communities’

Simon Dawes — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This article introduces Michel Maffesoli's article ‘From Society to Tribal Communities’, in which he argues that emerging communities, although post-modern, are not entirely new but archaic and rooted in pre-modernity, and that these tribes are further facilitated by new technological developments such as social media. The introduction summarizes the main argument of the article while contextualizing it within both Maffesoli's wider work and secondary literature that critically engages with his unique approach to studying postmodernism.

Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century, Harvey J. Graff, Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, $44.95 (Hardback) and $34.95 (Paperback), xvi + 323 pp. ISBN: 9781421417462.

Raf Vanderstraeten — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The Sociological Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 1009-1011, November 2016.

Talking About Troubles in Conversation, Gail Jefferson, Edited by Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner, and Anita Pomerantz. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, £64 (Hardback), 234pp. ISBN: 9780199937325.

Andrew Carlin — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The Sociological Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 1005-1009, November 2016.

Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, Emma Kowal, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015, £60 (Hardback), 215 pages, ISBN: 9781782386049.

Thomas Michel — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The Sociological Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 1011-1015, November 2016.

Being in community: re‐visioning Sociology

David Studdert, Valerie Walkerdine — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The Sociological Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 613-621, November 2016.

Issue Information

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The Sociological Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 609-611, November 2016.