In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976: 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPT's fine-grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy.

The performative co-construction of academic life through myriad metrics is now a global phenomenon as indicated by the plethora of university research or journal ranking systems and the publication of ‘league’ tables based on them. If these metrics are seen as actively constituting the social world, can an analysis of this ‘naturally occurring’ data reveal how these new technologies of value and measure are recursively defining the practices and subjects of university life? In the UK higher education sector, the otherwise mundane realities of academic life have come to be recursively lived through a succession of research assessment exercises (RAEs). Lived through not only in the RAEs themselves, but also through the managed incremental changes to the academic and organizational practices linked to the institutional imaginings of planning for, and anticipating the consequences of, the actual exercises. In the ‘planning for’ mode an increasing proportion of formerly sociology submissions have shifted into ‘social policy’. This is one instance of how institutional ‘game-playing’ in relation to the RAE enacts the social in quite fundamental ways. Planning an RAE 2008 submission in Sociology required anticipation of how a panel of 16 peers would evaluate 39 institutions by weighted, relative worth of: aggregated data from 1,267 individuals who, between them cited a total of 3,729 ‘outputs’; the detailed narrative and statistical data on the research environment; and a narrative account of academic ‘esteem’. This data provided such institutional variables as postgraduate student numbers, sources of student funding, and research income from various sources. To evaluate the ‘quality’ of outputs various measures of the ‘impact’ and/or ‘influence’ of journals, as developed from the Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports, was linked to the data. An exploratory modelling exercise using these variables to predict RAE 2008 revealed that despite what we might like to think about the subtle nuances involved in peer review judgements, it turns out that a fairly astonishing 83 per cent of the variance in outcomes can be predicted by some fairly simple ‘shadow metrics’: quality of journals in the submission, research income per capita and scale of research activity. We conclude that measuring the value of sociology involves multiple mutual constructions of reality within which ever more nuanced data assemblages are increasingly implicated and that analysis of this data can make explicit some of the parameters of enactment within which we operate in the contemporary academy.

This paper examines the relationship between metrics, markets and affect in the contemporary UK academy. It argues that the emergence of a particular structure of feeling amongst academics in the last few years has been closely associated with the growth and development of ‘quantified control’. It examines the functioning of a range of metrics: citations; workload models; transparent costing data; research assessments; teaching quality assessments; and commercial university league tables. It argues that these metrics, and others, although still embedded within an audit culture, increasingly function autonomously as a data assemblage able not just to mimic markets but, increasingly, to enact them. It concludes by posing some questions about the possible implications of this for the future of academic practice.

This paper focuses on private equity in the UK and is set in the context of debates about transformations in the City of London. The article focuses on a particular concept of trust as expressed by senior members of the private equity sector. The argument developed is based on interviews with five senior founding partners of private equity firms who talked to us about their background and education, their understanding of how private equity worked and the basis for successful money making and their relationships with those inside and outside the organization. All interviewees strongly asserted the need for absolute trust between senior partners as an essential condition for the successful operation of their business. At the same time, their description of trust in this context was that while it is deep, it is also easily broken, and that once broken, the breach cannot be forgiven. We call this ‘brittle trust’: asserted to be simultaneously strong while extremely fragile. The paper argues, drawing on Diego Gambetta's work on the Sicilian Mafia, that this concept of ‘trust’ reflects a particular understanding of the practice of private equity as a high risk, tough and unforgiving business that nevertheless requires high standards of personal integrity. The study allows us to understand something more about the social ideals that were built into this financial sector by its founders, which we argue formed a crucial part of the transformation of the financial sector.

This paper draws on mobilization theory, frame analysis and community characteristics to explore a high-profile campaign by a largely female workforce against the closure of a clothing plant owned by the international fashion house, Burberry. It analyses the particular factors associated with their mobilization and examines the workforce's propensity to act collectively, having exhibited little indication of a clear definition of its collective interests in the past. The paper highlights the central importance of perceived substantive and procedural injustice among the workforce, together with the ways in which geographic location and community characteristics reinforced their willingness to fight the closure decision. The paper concludes by considering the wider implications of this campaign for mobilization theory.

Studies of money management and control will have more cross-cultural relevance if the family context of money across generations is taken into account. The study of money management and control in middle-income nuclear and joint family households in urban India illustrates the importance of examining money flows within the wider family context because there is a two-way flow of money beyond the married couple – between parents and adult children, siblings and other members of the extended family. In the three or four generational joint family, control and management at the household level is not necessarily duplicated for the constituent couples. We draw on open-ended interviews of 40 persons from 27 urban middle-income households in North India, between November 2007 and January 2008, to show that the male control of money is the dominant pattern. This pattern is linked to the ideology of male dominance that is found among the middle, lower middle and struggling households, particularly in non-metropolitan households. The upper-middle-class households predominantly in metropolitan households show a pattern of joint or independent control. The focus is on the couple's money decisions within the context of the wider family.

This article examines the notion of ‘family’ to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be ‘part of’. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these ideas further through globally relevant but variable cultural themes of autonomy and relationality, suggesting the term ‘social person’ as a heuristic device to distinguish the sense of ‘close-knit selves’ that may be involved in some understandings of personhood. I argue that this version of personhood may be powerfully expressed through ‘family’ meanings, with a significance which can be at least provisionally mapped along lines of inequality and disadvantage within and between societies around the world. These forms of connectedness may be hard to grasp through those theoretical and methodological frameworks which emphasize the (relational) individual. I argue that, in affluent English speaking societies,^† there may be little alternative to the language of ‘family’ for expressing such forms of relationality and connection.

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge one's sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self-identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting ‘old’ friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of sociological work exploring the importance and meaning of kinship. Much of this work has criticized the ‘individualization’ thesis according to which changes in family structures over time have been interpreted as reflecting a fundamental decline in family values. Highlighting continuities as well as change in family life, this work has also suggested ways to move beyond the individualization debate and to develop alternative frameworks for the study of contemporary families and personal life, notably through the analysis of related practices. For various reasons, this recent work has focused primarily on the experience and practices of adults in ‘ordinary’ rather than more difficult family circumstances. This article aims to complement this work by focusing on the difficult family experiences of young people affected by parental substance use. It is argued that it is important not to lose sight of such experiences in order that sociological thinking reflect the diversity of family practices and the resources available to support them, including at younger ages. In addition, the importance of developing concepts or a language facilitating the exploration and communication of the emotional and symbolic significance of these practices is emphasized.

Despite an increasing sociological interest in the middle classes and their educational practices, research has largely concentrated on the white middle classes. This paper considers the case of the minority ethnic (ME) middle classes through empirical data from a small, exploratory study conducted in England with 36 minority ethnic, ‘middle-class’ individuals (parents, pupils and young professionals) from a range of ME backgrounds. It is argued that participants experienced ME middle-class identity as a profoundly conflictual and precarious space, negotiated through a matrix of relational classed and racialized positionings. ‘Authentic’ middle-classness remains the preserve of white society due to racial inequalities and the dominance of whiteness as the popularly legitimated marker of middle classness. Moreover, attempts to define an acceptable, legitimate and principled ME middle-class identity are compromised by the discursive threats of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘pretension’ and ‘misrecognition’.

Migration is a complex experience that differs from one migrant group to the other. Migrants have often been mistakenly seen as one homogenous group with shared experience, overlooking the diversity that exists within their visa conditions, cultural backgrounds and gender category. The generalization of the migration experience among all migrant groups usually overlooks the very specific issues arising within different types of migration and within different migrant groups. Generally, research on migrant women often portrays a victim image of them and neglects their strength and resilience. This paper addresses some of the gaps in the literature concerned with generalization and concepts of resilience. Utilizing a qualitative feminist methodology, conversations were made with eight Iraqi sponsored women living in Adelaide who arrived in Australia holding a Temporary Spouse Visa (TSV), with no specified period of entry. Within the focus on Iraqi women, the paper explores two concepts: challenges of a TSV within marriage migration and patterns of resilience amongst Iraqi sponsored women. The core argument of this paper is that the Australian TSV category which facilitates marriage migration is politically discriminative against women and significantly contributes to women's vulnerability to abuse.