Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Raju J. Das Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Aaron Major Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Cedric de Leon Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Mouin Rabbani Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Mathieu Hikaru Desan Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. There are two distinct modes of critique operative in Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. Bourdieu sometimes engages in what I call the realist mode of critique. This is premised on the idea that naïve experience of the social world dissimulates real relations of domination, which critique then reveals. At other times, Bourdieu engages in what I call the historicist mode of critique, which denaturalizes the doxic experience of the social order by demonstrating its arbitrary character. Whereas realist critique claims that the social world really is other than it appears, historicist critique suggests that it could be otherwise. This tension between the two modes of critique is not unique to Bourdieu, but also present in the Polanyian literature and in the Western Marxist tradition. By distinguishing between the two modes of critique, my aim is to clarify an oft-implicit division that cuts across different critical traditions in the social sciences. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-11-14T12:22:33Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221137301
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Bernard McKenna, Justin P. Brienza, Ali Intezari Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This paper builds on Smith and Hanley’s finding that Trump’s supporters were not solely driven by demographics and economic distress, but predominantly by prejudices and preference for an overt authoritarian leadership. Our longitudinal study of the 2020 US Presidential election extended their study to test additional propositions about tribalism by considering two intergroup factors: an orientation to protestors and minorities and conservative vs liberal ingroups. While there was a strong negative correlation between attitude to protestors and to minorities, the strength of correlation between liberal and conservative ingroup ‘membership’ and support/vote for Trump/Biden was more telling. Essentially, because tribalism factors overpowered almost every variable including political orientation, we conclude that identity-based tribalism is now the primary basis of political allegiance. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-11-14T12:20:53Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221135037
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Benjamin Y. Fong Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Aaron Major Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. In 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois published an article ‘L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique’ (‘The Negro Worker in America’) which draws from original survey data and historical analysis to develop a theory of Black labors’ structural disadvantage in post Civil War US capitalism. ‘L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique’ has essentially been forgotten. It has been accessible only to French speakers and has yet to be the subject of analysis or commentary. It deserves the full attention of not just Du Bois scholars, but all scholars who seek to understand the relationship between race, class, and capitalism in antebellum and post-Civil War America. Du Bois shows how White organized labor restricted Black workers’ access to union protections and the booming post-war labor market. His analysis highlights the interplay between racist ideology and the forces of racialized capitalism and reveals that the ‘early’ Du Bois critical, historical, materialist and attuned to socialist and labor politics. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-11-04T10:34:51Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221135194
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Melissa F. Weiner Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation of sovereign land. Educational curriculum plays a central role in settler colonialism by denying both long-standing connections to the land and dehumanizing those on it, relegating them to objects to be controlled or assimilated by colonizers, positioned as the colonized land’s rightful owners. This has long been the case for Palestinians. Violent expulsion from their land began with the settler colonial Zionist project in the late-19th century, a time of global colonization, and continues into the present, alongside the denial of Palestinian subjectivity and ‘permission to narrate’ their own history in public, political, and academic discourses. This paper examining US-based college-level introductory sociology textbooks finds that they replicate and perpetuate colonial narratives through Orientalist ascriptions and Palestinian de-Indigenization, while eliding the settler colonial and apartheid conditions under which they live, thereby contributing to the settler project themselves. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-11-01T07:31:30Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221132839
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Adrián Sotelo Valencia Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The super-exploitation of labor is the key category of the Marxist Theory of Dependency. However, its essential role is difficult to grasp at first glance. The hypothesis we propose in this paper is that its understanding and treatment require mediations in function of the dialectical totality that constitute the category of the super-exploitation of labor itself—that is, an analysis of the unity of the multiple relations, conditions, and determinations that constitute and explain it as a phenomenon. Only in this way can the super-exploitation of labor be understood as a category that is both determining and determined by mediations in which not only economic but also social and political dimensions intervene. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-11-01T07:29:11Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221130283
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Maha Nassar Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Nakba denialism – that is, denying Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland in 1948 – has long been a feature of US discourse on Palestine. Through a content analysis of Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, Exodus, I argue that Nakba denialism rests on three anti-Arab racist tropes. The first trope presents Palestinian Arabs as lacking religious attachment to Palestine, the second trope claims they lack modern feelings of national identity, and the third trope claims they are easily induced to commit acts of violence by their ruthless leaders. Through the deployment of these tropes, the Exodus narrative popularized key elements of Nakba denialism in US discourse by blaming the victims of settler colonial violence for the expulsions they faced. More broadly, this article shows how the imbrication of race and settler colonialism functions to epistemologically erase the very acts of settler colonial violence that produce racialized Others. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-10-25T09:01:22Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221132878
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Bhoomi K. Thakore Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Palestinian-Israeli land conflicts are rooted in the United Nations Resolution of 1948 declaring the statehood of Israel and causing forced displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral homes. Israel’s fascist and settler-colonialist practices have violated basic human rights for generations of Palestinians, including the current generation of Palestinian young adults: the Jil Oslo. In this paper, I discuss the traumatic effects of Israeli law, and the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in influencing conditions. I also discuss the various forms of resistance and activism among the Jil Oslo in Palestine and abroad. I conclude with a call for increased coalition building aimed at the fight for an independent Palestinian state. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-10-25T08:58:52Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221131991
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Nahla Abdo Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This paper contends that the Zionist policies implemented by Israel had and continue to have a grave impact not only on the Palestinians in historic Palestine alone but also follows them in the diaspora, where some Palestinians have taken refuge. This article argues that Israel’s apartheid regime, exposed by various international Human Rights Organizations, is not a recent discovery. Apartheid, the exclusion of the natives, and their racialization have accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception. Crucial questions raised in this paper include how Palestine and the Palestinians are conceived by Zionism, in and outside of Israel, and how they are perceived by the West, especially within the Canadian context. This paper pays special attention to comparing the experience of Palestinians with that of North America’s Indigenous population, specifically concerning Israel’s and Canada’s colonial policies towards the Indigenous peoples. It also discusses the impact of Israel’s policies of silencing and vilification that doggedly follow Palestinians into the diaspora: vilifications and silencing enacted by the Israel lobby through its various Zionist (Jewish) branches, whose primary role is to silence and vilify the Palestinians and curb criticism of Israel and Zionism. This policy, it is argued, is strongly supported by Canada, structurally, institutionally and through media propaganda. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-10-25T08:55:00Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221131315
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:M. Muhannad Ayyash Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article explores an important feature of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) that is salient in the North American and European academic landscape: the expulsion of the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel from rational and even anti-racist discourse. This expulsion takes place through the toxification of the Palestinian other whereby Palestinian epistemology is to be mistrusted and shunned because it is allegedly rooted in an antisemitic disposition. This amounts to a racialization of the Palestinian critique in the name of anti-racism, which can be seen in recent definitions of antisemitism, the debate over the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and harassment campaigns against Palestinian scholars. I argue that we must name this expulsion as a form of racialization that is part and parcel of colonial modernity. The article concludes that without a centralization of the Palestinian critique, decolonial and anti-racist efforts will not live up to their professed ideals. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-10-12T08:14:49Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221130415
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Shimaa Hatab Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The article engages critically with the literature on the relationship between social movements and political parties. It traces the representation crisis in Chile with a dual focus on the meso-institutional supply side of partisan politics and the microfoundational demand side of protest activity (2006–2019). I argue that the dialectical relationship between political parties’ programmatic dealignment and realignment and social actors’ framing politics determined the magnitude, intensity, and ideational content of protest mobilization. Social actors’ perception of their position in polity structure determined the content of their demands. Savvy actors started with a realignment frame in 2006 to push through socioeconomic reforms from within the parameters of the existing system. They, however, afforded an anti-establishment frame with the ‘social outbreak’ in 2019 to weed out the vestiges of Pinochet’s regime. Social forces pushed political parties to reposition their policy programs, reset agenda priorities, and recast their linkages to society. I draw on interview data, archival works, and Observatory of Conflicts–Cumulative Dataset to substantiate my argument. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-09-07T06:12:00Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221122708
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Ruth Milkman Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Domestic workers—specifically in-home health care workers, childcare providers, and house cleaners—are generally concentrated at the bottom of the US labor market. Yet, there is also substantial stratification among and within each of these occupations. This article explores the heterogeneity in pay and working conditions among domestic workers in the 21st-century United States, which has been understudied to date. After sketching national patterns of stratification in this set of occupations, the focus shifts to qualitative evidence on inequalities among domestic workers drawn from focus groups conducted in New York City shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the impact of the pandemic on in-home domestic workers is briefly considered. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-09-07T01:16:07Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221123034
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Rubén Flores Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Ghulam Ali Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Giorgos Venizelos Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Donald Trump’s style is often described as provocative and his administration as catastrophic. Despite this, his popularity remained high throughout his term in office, and in the 2020 US elections, he received 10 million votes more than in 2016. This paper investigates the paradox of political identification through a discursive, performative and stylistic framework. It argues that policy outcomes and rhetorical consistency do not suffice in understanding identification. Rather, transgression – which is typical of populist performativity – plays a pivotal role in interpellating affective collective subjectivities. This article investigates the case of Donald Trump, from his emergence in 2015 until the 2021 Capitol insurgence. It employs discourse and visual analysis to study Trump’s rhetoric and performativity, integrating this with in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to examine the ways his style resonated with his supporters. It concludes that charismatic performativity and transgression play a crucial role in political identification regardless of the quality of institutional performance. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-08-24T05:37:42Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221118223
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Amy A. Quark Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. We explore puzzling outcomes in a Virginia school district: in 2018, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board voted to redraw attendance boundaries to achieve greater racial and socio-economic integration among its middle schools, yet abandoned similar efforts for high schools. Drawing on Critical Race perspectives, we conducted a content analysis of archival materials, including school board meeting transcripts, to analyze the conditions under which school decision-makers mobilize to enact equity-oriented policy reforms. We found that school board members abandoned high school rezoning in the face of fierce opposition from white, affluent residents who saw school reassignments as a threat to their entitlements to a highly rated school and to their property values. For the middle schools, board members avoided white families’ entitlements, which neutralized opposition, at the same time as strong community advocacy in favor of equity and integration shifted the political landscape. This activated ‘interest convergence’ among school board members supportive of equity and resulted in the approval of middle-school attendance boundaries that produced greater racial and socioeconomic integration. This case underscores the importance of community advocacy for equity-based reforms; however, the scope of these efforts may be limited to changes that do not substantively threaten white parents’ perceived entitlements. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-08-20T05:47:38Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221118000
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Daniel Sullivan Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Yunus Yücel, Berkay Kabalay Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article aims to explain the political-economic character of the increasing suicides in Turkey since 2018 that stem from indebtedness, poverty, and unemployment. It frames the acts as economy-relevant suicides to emphasize the embeddedness of these suicides within the neoliberal transformation and its consequences at the global and national levels. In this regard, the study traces the trajectory of neoliberalism in Turkey from 1980 to the COVID-19 pandemic, and critically evaluates the political and economic decisions of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to reveal the causal links with the increasing number of suicides. The study argues that two aspects of neoliberalization have paved the way for the post-2018 suicides: the declining political and economic power of the working class and the outcomes of financialization such as long-term unemployment and indebtedness. Thus, it argues that economy-relevant suicides are pathologic but depict political character, regardless of their effectiveness as a political strategy, given the consequences of the neoliberal transformation and political choices in due course. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-07-21T10:33:23Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221113072
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Alexander M. Stoner Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Sonal Sharma Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article discusses the contradictions of neoliberal urbanism in the context of Indian cities. Focusing on gated neighborhoods as a quintessential feature of neoliberal urbanism, it unpacks the changing meaning and significance of gated neighborhoods (GNs) and their representative organizations, the Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), in mediating the relationship between the propertied middle classes and the urban poor. A few decades into the making, I argue that neoliberal urbanism is beginning to produce contradictory outcomes through its specific elements such as the GNs. Using the case of domestic workers, I show that domestic workers are performing collective actions and targeting GNs as a whole. Domestic workers’ actions are subverting the purpose of physical features and institutional features of GNs to their advantage as workers. How can middle-class residents’ tools of control and exclusion become the new means of power and resistance for a section of the urban poor—domestic workers' Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-07-16T05:51:02Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221112827
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Saladdin Ahmed Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This paper argues that fascism is an ideological form rather than an ideological system. An ideology form can best be understood as a set of overall characteristics that distinguish a class of ideologies from other classes of ideologies. This theory enhances our capacity for recognizing, problematizing, and critically analyzing both existing and potential variations of fascism. Fascist movements in different sociohistorical and geopolitical circumstances vary in terms of their belief systems, strategies, and politics, so conventional comparative methods and approaches that deduce their criteria from a particular model have restricted the area of fascism studies. I argue for a trans-spatial and transhistorical concept with flexible theoretical applications. My central claim is that fascism denotes a class of ideologies that have a similar form, just as a concept such as egalitarianism, socialism, sexism, or sectarianism makes sense as a form of ideology rather than a particular ideology or philosophy. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-07-15T09:35:56Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221109869
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Felix del Campo Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The renewed interest in unearthing the structural similarities between neoliberalism’s ‘authoritarianism’ and the contemporary far-right has paid little to no attention to another critical overlap between the two: the deep aversion towards the ‘feminisation of society’. This paper aims twofold: first, I theorise the relation between gender and the state under neoliberalism as a fundamental aspect of its de-democratising project, which underscores a structural similarity between the two. Second, I highlight the role of politicising culture in both neoliberalism and the far-right. Drawing on Wilhelm Röpke’s theorisation of the cultural-symbolic and anthropological order as a political practice mystifying seemingly ‘autonomous’ political and economic orders, I show how the far-right ‘anti-gender’ culture wars are thoroughly compatible with neoliberalism. Despite the former’s rhetorical antagonism with the latter, ‘tradwives’ and bodybuilders are prime ‘authoritarian’ neoliberal subjects. I find evidence in the work of the German identitarians organised around the Institut für Staatspolitik. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-07-09T11:13:38Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221109169
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Mikael Holmqvist, Ilan Wiesel Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. ‘Elite communities’ are the areas where the wealthy, and even ‘superrich’, live, socialize and raise their children as future economic and financial elites; they are the places where a few lead socially and economically privileged lives. Earlier studies have concentrated on the inner dynamics of these settings, focusing on the way residents are constructed and socialized as elites through their social, communicative and aesthetic abilities that are perceived as exemplary in contemporary neoliberal society. In this paper, we broaden the perspective, by exploring how these areas contribute to polarization, that is, how they generate distinctions based on money, morals and manners that are peculiar to neoliberalism’s idealization of ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘self-management’, ‘leadership’ and the pursuit of an ‘active lifestyle’. Our data come from two major ethnographic studies: one conducted between 2010 and 2015 of Sweden’s wealthiest community, Djursholm, that is populated by the country’s business and financial elites; the other conducted between 2016 and 2019 of three of Australia’s most prestigious and economically privileged suburbs, Toorak (Melbourne), Mosman (Sydney) and Cottesloe (Perth). Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-07-07T08:25:02Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221108656
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Marcello Musto Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. While political science has probed the ideological, political, economic and even psychological motivations behind the drive to war, socialist theory has made a unique contribution by highlighting the relationship between the development of capitalism and war. There’s a long and rich tradition of the Left’s opposition to militarism that dates back to the International Working Men’s Association. It is an excellent resource for understanding the origins of war under capitalism and helping leftists maintain our clear opposition to it. In this article, the author examines the position of all the main currents (socialist, socialdemocratic, communist, anarchist and feminist) intellectuals (Engels, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jaurès, Luxemburg, Lenin, Mao and Khrushchev) of the Left on the war and its different declinations (‘war of defence’, ‘just war’, ‘revolutionary war’). Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-07-01T10:20:58Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221101871
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Jacqueline Ross, John Welsh Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Tipping has been a legally recognized form of labor remuneration in the United States for many decades, but it is experiencing a resurgence outside of its usual confines in the hospitality sector. The proliferation of the practice is bound to the long-term economic shift into services, as well as the more recent expansion of the gig economy. Tipping informalizes the wage relation, incentivizes the worker in precarity, and internalizes social relations of subordination, and is thus a highly effective technique of labor subsumption particularly suitable for the idiomatic kind of social dependencies and subordination required by an increasingly ‘neo-feudal’ capitalism. Around the spread of the practice, there is an apologetic liberal discourse on freedom and ‘choice’ that emphasizes the supposed advantages of tipping for the worker subjected to it, over and above the increasingly problematic wage relation. Drawing anecdotally on a critical insider-ethnography of laboring in the restaurant industry of the Hamptons (Long Island, New York), and by enlisting a Neo-Roman concept of liberty, the article attempts a critical reappraisal of liberal claims regarding tipping as a form of remuneration in the so-called ‘service sector’. Instead, we indicate how tipping actually produces more appropriately governable worker subjectivities for capital. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-23T05:14:48Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221104637
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Tom Brass Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Daniel Šitera Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. In Czechia, one of the statistically most equal and least indebted states, almost one-tenth of its (mostly low-income) population is entrapped in debt enforcement proceedings. I foreground such a contradiction to investigate the politics of the debtfare state in East-Central Europe (ECE). This nuances the scholarship on the repolitization of the ECE neoliberal state by populist forces and their instrumentalization of its middle-class welfare state strategies in the 2010s. Identifying the Czech debt enforcement industry as a leading poverty industry in ECE, I explore its depoliticizing origins in the Debt Enforcement Order (DEO), a flagship legal framework regulating the creditor–debtor–bailiff relations. Interpreting the political struggle over the DEO-centered debtfare state strategy, I then trace its limited repolitization since the mid-2010s, which redirects its reforms from their original pro-creditor and -bailiff prioritization to a prioritization of low-income debtors. This politics complements the repolitization of the neoliberal state beyond populism. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-13T01:41:59Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221104177
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Madalitso Zililo Phiri Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Forty years have passed since the implementation of the pernicious neoliberal structural reforms on the African continent in 1981. If 2021 marked a 40-year commemoration of a diabolical neocolonial project such as neoliberalism, then the year 2020 signified another 40-year period of rebirth aborted, as the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980 was undermined in favour of the Berg Report of 1981. These two periodizations delineate African liberation or continued neocolonial oppression, yet also coincide with Thandika Mkandawire’s life’s strivings. How do Mkandawire’s ideas on social policy, inspired by radical African Nationalists, aid in the dismantling of contemporary forms of racialized neoliberal social policy making' Mkandawire’s life straddled two 40-year periods (1940–1980 and 1980–2020) marked by sui generis contributions to African and global social sciences. This paper recasts his scholarly contributions on transformative social policy as a prophetic theoretician of African liberation. Mkandawire’s scholarly corpus provides a programmatic approach to the unmaking of a hierarchical racialized neoliberal global order. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-07T08:39:25Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221100832
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Zaheer Baber Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Carol Chan, Rosario Fernández-Ossandón Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Many Chilean women employers desire domestic workers who are also ‘partners’ or ‘someone to do life with’. Taking ‘partnership’ or ‘compañerismo’ seriously, this paper draws on an affective labor framework and economic sociology to examine how care and power operate in affective and highly commodified labor relations between Chilean women employers and migrant Filipina domestic workers. We contextualize this discussion within historical relations of servitude in Chile and salient demands for more horizontal social and gender relations. We show that rather than reinforcing power or control, employers’ emphases on affective aspects of the labor relation enable their willful ignorance of power hierarchies, through normalizing the racialized presence of the worker in the household. However, explicit talk about money exposes the material conditions of affect and care in this racialized affective relationship. This reveals the uneven distribution and production of both care and power in the household, and highlights the disruptive nature of care work as affective labor. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-02T10:11:11Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221100268
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Fouad Mami Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Ning Zhang Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Nupur Pattanaik Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Ivan Light Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Max Weber insisted that followers grant charismatic authority, but he did not address the cultural prerequisites that enable leaders to acquire it from them. Prophecy is the royal road. When a prophetic tradition has taught people to expect saviors in times of crisis, believers are primed to award charismatic authority to someone who resembles their expectation. The case of Donald Trump illustrates the importance of prophecy on the bestowal of charismatic authority. Within the Republican Party, two distinct prophetic traditions validated Trump’s salvific mission, thus enabling him to acquire power of command. Adhering to Biblical prophecy, conservative Protestants identified Donald Trump as God’s agent in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ. Also within the Republican Party, adhering to developmental economics, secular conservatives identified Donald Trump as a heroic entrepreneur whose vigor would restore America’s greatness. Because of Trump’s striking resemblance to Batman, the comic superhero’s many fans also had prior ideational access to Trump’s salvific mission. In the United States, the messianic prophecy of a tough-guy entrepreneur can derive from sacred culture, academic culture, popular culture, or from all three. The confluence produced a voter bloc primed to award charismatic authority to Trump. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-23T09:53:51Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221087425
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The article examines the effects of the normalization of a new form of precarious work—tied to the gig economy and shaped by the imperatives of neoliberalism—in impeding the formation of solidarity that would enable workers to challenge structural issues that shape their precarity, although without entirely preventing collective organization. While the article focuses on the manifestation of the new precarity and workers’ responses in the app-based transport service in Indonesia, it seeks insights from the different experiences of other countries. It is argued here that the historical absence of the Standard Employment Relationship (SER), and the historically rooted ineffectiveness of labor and broader society movements aggravate problems in translating the precarity discourse into the organizational struggles of contemporary labor. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-09T05:26:47Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221087130
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Yue Zhou Lin Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Gramscian scholars have engaged with Gramsci’s leitmotif (‘rhythm of thought’) and the stato integrale (integral state), a concept he introduced in Autumn 1930. This represents remarkable progress in the Marxist community. But what requires further attention is the interconnection between an integral state and a totalitarian one, two of the three expressions of state-society formations that Perry Anderson identified as Gramsci’s antinomies. This article argues that the integral state is fragile but hegemonic if it can be sustained. Otherwise, it can degenerate into a totalitarian state. The article refigures the ‘integral state’ as the ‘integral state-society’. It exists relatively, depending on whether the ‘integral momentum’ or the ‘totalitarian tendency’ prevails in a dynamic interaction between radical Left, Far Right, and those currents in between. Identifying this relativity helps to formulate a deeper understanding of Gramsci’s thought and show how his legacy supports a class struggle perspective on the COVID-19 interregnum. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-09T05:24:20Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221086490
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Tom Brass Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Tim Christiaens Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:M. Anwar Hossen Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Sociology is one of the major disciplines to foster understanding and protection of the livelihoods of local people. For instance, the discipline can describe the linkage between the environment and people and the effects of environmental change on local groups of people in a Delta country such as Bangladesh. However, the imperial philosophy of modernity that dominates the discipline and which is evident in the Sociology department at the University of Dhaka (UofD) underscores a considerable distance between academic conceptualizations of local perspectives on issues such as climatic change and the actual views of the local people of Bangladesh. Grounded on this assertion, this paper explores a question: What are the challenges for Sociology to represent Delta people and protect their social justice' The paper depends on the content analysis of sociological practices at UofD: imperial modernity and climatic adaptation. The findings of the paper argue that Sociology has been failing to represent the local meanings of climatic change due to the domination of imperial conceptualizations of modernity. Climate finance conceptualized by a Western perspective, and Sociology, as a discipline, fails to represent locally contextualized meanings related to climate finance; thus, the marginalized groups of people are increasingly facing survival challenges responsible for climate apartheid. Only a decolonized Sociology can challenge this imperial domination and play an effective role in reducing the discipline’s gap of understanding of the local people and in promoting social justice in Delta Bangladesh. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-09T05:17:19Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221085687
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Cihan Tuğal Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Scholars have argued that megaprojects’ turn away from issues of employment, and mass housing are among the core traits of neoliberalism. Turkey, though once seen as a paragon of neoliberalism, problematizes this generalization. Erdoğanist megaprojects have created jobs and residence for millions, and garner consent. ‘Embedded neoliberalism’, a concept frequently used to explain increasing state involvement under neoliberalism, sheds light on the governing AKP’s power, but is insufficient in explaining its core dynamics. Whereas the ‘embedded neoliberalism’ literature downplays the role of the government as a producer, the ‘state capitalism’ literature, as applied to Turkey, overrates the extent to which this country has moved away from neoliberalism. The concept ‘neoliberal statism’ (which puts the emphasis on the consent-generating and political aspects of the new economy) better captures the AKP’s path. Megaproject-driven growth and popular consent, however, are restricted by vulnerabilities that also afflict neoliberal statism as a broader growth strategy. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-05T11:56:39Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221086284
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Raju J Das Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to increased scholarly attention to an important ‘human need’: good health. This article is about the relation between workers’ health and capitalist production, as Marx examines it in his magnum opus. While Marx’s main focus in Capital Volume 1 is on the production of surplus value by workers and its appropriation by capitalists, he does provide insights into how capitalism ruins the health of workers themselves, although these insights are scattered. In this article, I systematically re-articulate and analyse Marx’s thoughts about workers’ health in relation to some of the key-categories of his political economy: the value of labour power relative to wages; employment precarity; long working day; hidden abode of production; capitalists’ despotic control over workers; and the capitalist transformation of nature. I briefly relate Marx’s ideas about workers’ health from Capital Volume 1 to some contemporary research on the social dimensions of health. I also show that Marx’s explicit ideas about workers’ health, which are my main focus, point to a broader approach to the topic that is only implicit in his thinking. I draw out some practical implications of this approach. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-03-28T09:14:46Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221083503 Issue No:Vol. 1 (2022)
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Christoph Sorg Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. With the advent of digitalization, the more techno-optimist among critics of capitalism have articulated new calls for post-work and post-scarcity economics made possible by new advances in information and communication technology. Quite recently, some of this debate shifted for calls for digital-democratic planning to replace market-based allocation. This article will trace the lineages of this shift and present these new calls for digitally enabled and democratic planning. I will then argue that much of the discussion focuses on capitalism’s laws of economic motion, while rendering less visible capitalism’s social, political, and ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. To remedy this shortcoming I will ask how these fit into the recent debate and suggest avenues to extend the discussion of democratic planning in that way. Concretely, I will discuss features of a postcapitalist mode of reproduction that abolishes capital’s subordination of non-waged and waged care work. The following part will focus on both planning’s need to calculate ecological externalities and consequently determine sustainable and egalitarian paths for social and technological development on a world scale. The last section will elaborate on the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic planning’ in terms of planning’s decision-making, multi-scalar politics, and politics of cultural recognition. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-03-17T10:03:36Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221081058
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Joe Pateman Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. According to an old legend, Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Soviet Marxism, overlooked Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. For Marxist humanists, this theory underlies the emancipatory thrust of Marx’s thought, and since, in their view, Lenin’s acolytes ignored alienation, communist regimes failed to empower the workers. Considering these claims, this article challenges the legend that Lenin himself neglected Marx’s theory of alienation. It argues that this theory was central to Lenin’s Marxism. In fact, Lenin was among the first to discover the concept in Marx’s work, although he also analysed the concept independently. Like Marx, Lenin criticised capitalist alienation and defined communism as a non-alienated society. After the October Revolution, however, Lenin struggled to realise this goal. Responding to a failed European socialist revolution, a brutal civil war, a deadly famine and widespread cultural backwardness, Lenin made concessions to alienation. Nevertheless, Lenin’s legacy provides an important insight into alienation today. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-03-08T01:06:46Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221080552
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Markus Lundström Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Whereas the sociology of food has drawn attention to differences between corporate and alternative foodways, the political imaginations underpinning the latter are often overlooked. This article distinguishes between different political imaginations of the community kitchen, a set of practices characterised by collective preparation and redistribution of food. The analysis builds on ethnographic and archive material in Sweden to outline how the folkkök (people’s kitchen) was once an institutional practice to address urban food insecurity, soon outsourced as altruistic soup kitchens, and then regenerated a century later by the anarchist movement. By distinguishing between altruistic and anarchistic imaginations in this analysis, the article adds another layer to the critical sociological study of alternative foodways. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-03-03T11:37:50Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221077604
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Linea M. Petersen, Sine N. Just, Emil Husted Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Using unconditional basic income (UBI) as its empirical prism, this article offers new impetus to the foundational debate within critical theory as to whether and how redistribution and recognition can relate productively to each other. We explore the possibility of redistributive solidarity, arguing that unconditional and universal redistribution may be a means of furthering the recognition of different subjectivities that are not solely defined by their productive relations of labor. Seeing such redistributive solidarity as a potential but not necessary outcome of UBI, we develop a typology of existing UBI experiments that divide these according to whether they seek to affirm or transform the current social order based on principles of growth or degrowth. Surveying these four types of UBI, we find that the envisioned form of economic redistribution shapes the potential for social recognition. While the relationship is one of utopian potential rather than causal necessity, UBI may indeed enable redistributive solidarity. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-03-02T04:45:25Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221080364
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Peter Anton Zoettl Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article discusses the life and death of juvenile drug dealers in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where the drug business has become omnipresent and a growing number of youths from the urban periphery are taking up a career with one of the country’s many drug gangs. The price most of them pay for their economic success as traffickers is high: they are repeatedly imprisoned under harsh conditions, suffer severe physical violence and, at times, die at young age. Drawing on the narratives of juveniles from Bahia and the writings of Bataille and Baudrillard, the youths’ approach to life is discussed as a knowingly illusory attempt to regain their sovereignty within the boundaries of consumer capitalism. It is argued that their death is not a blow of fate, but rather the premeditated consequence of their acquisition of consumer-citizenship ‘on credit’ and, ultimately, their refusal to constitute Brazil’s modern precariat. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-02-04T12:11:19Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205211073500
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Saif Shahin Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has a neoliberal orientation. Moreover, neoliberalism underpins a hierarchical structure of relations that privileges some nations as superior and makes other nations willing participants in their own subordination. While scholars of press–state relations regard newsmaking as epiphenomenal to foreign policymaking, this article argues that newsmaking and policymaking are mutually constitutive social phenomena: both draw from and, in turn, reproduce a shared conception of national identity vis-à-vis other nations. In doing so, the article illustrates the productive power of news media in international relations. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-01-27T10:59:32Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205211072455
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Alexander Paulsson, Till Koglin Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical–historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact of COVID-19 on the marketized public transport system in Stockholm, Sweden. During COVID-19, ridership dropped as did ticket revenues, which put the market under operational and financial distress. Drawing on a discussion of the norms and techniques of marketization, we probe how the contracted bus operators responded to the pandemic, how they tried to save the market from collapsing, and whether the measures taken suggest an organized move away from neoliberal policies. Adding to recent debates of COVID-19 and neoliberalism’s longevity, we conclude that although the norms underpinning marketization remained unquestioned, the techniques were partly re-evaluated in the midst of the global crisis as a way to protect the established neoliberal policies from falling apart. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-01-27T10:55:18Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205211069862
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Filomin C. Gutierrez Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The article problematizes state penality as a mechanism of repression of precarious workers through a war on drugs in the Philippines. The narratives of 27 arrested ‘drug personalities’ in Metro Manila tell of how methamphetamine energizes bodies and motivates minds for productive work. Bidding to be classified as willing and able workers and family men, the study’s participants orient to a moral stratification that pits the ‘moral versus immoral’ and the ‘hardworking versus lazy’. Qualifying their drug use as strategic and calculated, they uphold the neoliberal values of individual choice and accountability. Their support for the anti-drug campaign stems from their recognition of a drug problem and the socioemotional toll of the dysfunctions of living in the slums. While trade liberalization facilitates methamphetamine inflow, a war on drugs fuels an authoritarian populism. As the state reaffirms symbolic mission to protect its citizens, it blames precarity to a problem population. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-01-08T06:30:56Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205211070236
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Ngai Pun, Kaxton Siu, Heidi Gottfried First page: 1115 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Kaxton Siu, Shuheng Jin First page: 1123 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Mechanisms to control Hong Kong’s young workers are embedded in inadequate labour protections within the government’s social welfare system and in prevalent informalization workplace practices. This article maintains that these control mechanisms have their origins in Hong Kong’s colonial era. Following Harvey, we argue that these control mechanisms are expressions of contradictions of capital in production and reproduction spheres. We identify the foundational and moving contradictions of capital expressed in Hong Kong’s lack of social welfare and employment protections, commodification of education, speculation in the housing market, patterns of work casualization and technology-induced labour-saving strategies, leading to precarity and everyday distress among young workers. New control mechanisms and contradictions of capital notwithstanding, this article highlights experiments to create spaces of resistance by Hong Kong’s young working classes in the hope of resisting the increasing degradation of their everyday living standards. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-02T08:12:45Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221097907
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Tommy Tse First page: 1141 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This research challenges the growing theoretical Global North–South divide and refines an ‘ex-centric’ theorisation of creative labour in the context of the increasingly monopolising but competitive capitalism in Asia. While it argues that job insecurity is not just a universal, objective condition, but varying, subjective experiences of anxiety and dissatisfaction for creative workers, we adopt a pluralist epistemological approach and identify the nuanced intersections among key global, local, and sectoral trends – increased use of digital technology, an Indigenous and outdated work ethic, and a devaluation of creativity both in industry and society – that co-configure Hong Kong creative workers’ divergent perceptions of and responses to job insecurities. Rather than merely focusing on job tenure insecurity and employment insecurity, we classify and highlight the conceptual distinctions among eight types of job insecurity for Hong Kong creative workers, some of which enable creative worker-actor’s response, resilience, and resistance to the exploitative creative labour process. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-14T09:15:37Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221087345
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Tat Chor Au-Yeung, Jack Qiu First page: 1169 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Informed by the economic sociology of work, this qualitative study employs a dynamic and multi-dimensional notion of embeddedness to critique the social bases of gig work and the platform-mediated labour market, with a series of embedding, disembedding and re-embedding forces. Conducting in-depth interviews with 24 gig workers, the findings reveal how gig work is incorporated into Hong Kong’s labour market and the ways in which gig work is reshaping the power of workers via digital platforms. First, gig work is institutionally embedded in a policy framework centred on weak regulation and protection, resulting in platforms’ expandable and retractable control over labour. Second, gig work is embedded in occupational norms and professional practices, in which workers practise multi-platforming and marketplace resistance when defending their interests. Finally, the embedded connectivity of gig work boosts the scalability of labour market competition but engenders algorithmic opacity. The marketplace bargaining power of gig workers is twofold: workers’ dependence on platforms and their working status. Hence, the embeddedness of gig work and platforms is far from stable but involves new tensions that challenge the gigification and platformisation of work. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-14T09:20:53Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221090581
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Lisa Y.M. Leung First page: 1189 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the need for online food delivery services (such as Deliveroo and Foodpanda), creating new job opportunities for South Asian youths. However, outbreaks of infected cases in districts populated by South Asians have spurred ‘racist’ remarks by customers, perhaps triggered by a flurry of negative mainstream news reports and social media outbursts targeted at South Asians. These behaviours reveal the added precariousness of ethnic minority employment. This paper examines the inter-sectional politics of race and class involved in platformed work, in the case of food delivery services. It discusses how the algorithmically controlled platformed economy may have an impact on racial minority workers. Employing the conceptual framing of ‘invisibility’, and notions around ‘platformed/ gig labour’, it argues that neo-liberalised infrastructural capitalism aggravates algorithmic surveillance of racial minority workers. It suggests the possible resilience of racial minority workers in the globally popular business model. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-05-03T06:44:37Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221091449
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Yuyang Kang, Ka Ho Mok First page: 1205 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Human capital theory has been one of the most influential theories in national policymaking since the 1980s. The major assertion is that individuals can attain better employment outcomes through investing in degrees and credentials. Following the economic reforms of the late 1970s, Chinese families have reverted to the tradition of investing in the education of their children, hoping that the human capital accumulated through higher education will translate into economic capital, enhancing their children’s upward social mobility. However, the rapid expansion of Chinese higher education since 1999 has caused an educational inflation, adversely affecting graduate employment. This article critically examines China’s response to global capitalism through bureaucratic adjustment of higher education expansion in managing the market transition and social reproduction of labour challenges within a relatively short historic period of ‘compressed development’. Without effective articulation between higher education expansion and the changing labour needs during the market transition, the rush to higher education expansion has created different forms of social and economic contradictions. More specifically, this article argues that social embeddedness including parental influence, institutional policies, and social capital are important factors to be considered in explaining the relationship between education and work in the Chinese context. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-04-14T09:17:53Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221088894
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Haley Kwan First page: 1221 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article draws on a study conducted over a period of 17 months, including chatnography and semi-structured interviews with 30 female platform drivers working in China’s hail-riding industry, and makes three important contributions to the labour process and the social reproduction process scholarship. First, it fills a gap in the burgeoning literature on the gendered experience of gig work and of work–family flexibility in an on-demand economy. Women’s surplus production, as a means of subsistence for oneself and the family, is contradictory to childcare commitments in the labour process. Second, it theorises that the communicative space is a space for social reproduction in which labour-power is replenished outside the household. Labour productivity is not solely determined by algorithmic logic and platform control, but rather is organised by the social reproduction process. Third, it discusses how female platform workers negotiate technological insecurity and resist the platform’s control over and sexual exploitation in the communicative space. This sheds light on how the social reproduction process creates a potential for women’s solidarity. Women fight against sexual harassment and gender-based violence by utilising communication technologies, such as WeChat and TikTok. The social reproduction process organises labour resistance in a time of individual and collective crisis. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-03T02:24:58Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221101451
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Ngai Pun First page: 1237 Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Derived from post-industrial society experiences, current social theorists often argue that the working class no longer plays an active role in transforming society, thereby making the issue of working-class solidarity obsolete. This paper critically revisits Marx’s theories on solidarity and re-engages the debates by intersecting macro structural analysis with micro-foundation of working-class solidarity. The article formulates the concept of working-class solidarity in two layers of analysis: the first is a macro structural approach driven by class conflict, social grievance, and economic crisis directly connected to the social transformation of the neoliberal market economy; and the second looks at micro process of cooperation and mutual support at the level of everyday practice, that is, a collective-emotional environment that creates agency and a soft solidarity base for building bonds among working-class youth. The logic of solidarity is rescued through a multiplicity of working-class youth’s behaviors discovered in school and the workplace. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-06-23T05:14:31Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221105445
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
