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Authors:Ahmad Mohammadpour Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The state murder of Jîna Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in Tehran on 16 September 2022, while in custody of the Islamic Republic’s morality police, prompted a widespread uprising across Iran unprecedented in scale since the popular 1979 revolution. Adopting the Kurdish catchphrase ‘Jin, Jîyan, Azadî’ (Woman, Life, Freedom), this movement was largely centered in Kurdistan (known as Rojhelat) and Balochistan, two ethnically minoritized and economically de-developed regions, where the state deployed deadly violence and brutality to crush the protests. This article juxtaposes two competing narratives of this uprising. The first insists on branding the movement as a singular ‘national’ uprising of ‘Iranian women’. The second recognizes a plurality of women, particularly those from marginalized nations, such as Kurdish and Balochi women, and underlines the structural national, ethnoreligious, and linguistic oppression elided in the narrative of undifferentiated Iranian womanhood. Drawing on the notion of intersectionality, I argue that the elite nationalist discourse of Iranian womanhood reproduces the state’s ethnoreligious and linguistic suppression of non-Persian-speaking marginalized communities. Moreover, such a selective reading of gender inequality in Iran is unable and/or unwilling to embrace the intersectionality and multiplicity of women’s life experiences in Iran, particularly in its ethnic peripheries. This article offers a critical reassessment of Iranian feminism and its methodology of privilege, proposing instead a decolonized approach that invites nationalist Persian/Iranian activists to interrogate Persianness as a marker of official national identity and institutionalized supremacy. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-05-20T05:27:32Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231176051
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Authors:Zygmunt Bauman Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. In an unpublished manuscript that Zygmunt Bauman wrote around the year 2008, Bauman’s overall theory of liquid modernity is sketched in relation to recent types of organization. He describes a shift from classical ‘managerialism’ to the ‘experience economy’, resulting in organizations characterized as eclectic and nonlinear. Ambiguous consequences of this transition follow for individual organization members. The most important trait of and expectation for liquidly modern employees will be their flexibility. Workplaces made seductive and attractive, with food, sport, bike racks and stylish informality, create a fragile cocoon for the elite of knowledge workers. For Bauman, such employees’ materialize love and happiness by buying things, resulting in more working hours to gain the money required to purchase further things in a ‘vicious circle’. The less qualified cannot access either these things or similar working conditions, which is one critical dimension of these recent transformations. Managerially, practices in flexible organizations continuously keep elite employees in a state of uncertainty and urgency. Bauman closes by embedding these tendencies of organizations’ new voraciousness in his overall theme of liquid modernity, as he points to unintended consequences of lighter and more flexible organizational forms. The manuscript is accompanied by a commentary, in which Stewart Clegg, one of the leading scholars in recent attempts to connect Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity with management and organization studies, contextualizes the work. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-05-17T05:51:33Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231170923
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Authors:Nadia Alahmed Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article explores the transformation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ viewpoint on Israel between the early and mid-20th century. It highlights historical and political forces that compelled him to support the Zionist project, especially Black Orientalism, and the connections between Black Nationalism and Zionism, connections between Black and Jewish diasporic experiences. Finally, the article reveals how Gamal Abdel Nasser and the connections between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism he forged, and the Suez Canal crisis propelled a new era in the Black discourse on Israel, envisioning Israel as a neo-colonial state set to protect Western interests in the Middle East. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-05-12T05:57:52Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231173440
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Authors:David G. Embrick, Johnny Eric Williams Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. In this paper, we outline the contours of the history of oppression toward Palestinians to discern how the settler colonial racial capitalist state of Israel generates alienation in Palestinians. To accomplish this, we explore how the Global North disregards and/or participates in propping up Israel’s oppressive structural processes for stripping Palestinians of their land, resources, and identity. This includes the Palestinian healthcare system that has suffered decades of deliberate neglect, under-development, and strategic fragmentation, which hindered its coronavirus disease response. We conclude with implications and suggestions for rethinking not only how Palestinians are racialized and alienated as ‘others’ in a settler colonial racial capitalist system of oppression, but how the slow process of identity erosion (and perversion) works to dehumanize and justify the dispossession of Palestinians. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-05-09T12:44:56Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231172730
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Authors:Tom Brass Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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Authors:Jason C. Mueller Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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Authors:Federica Stagni Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. On 8 August 2019, Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian living in Beit Sahour, was brutally beaten by members of her family. Since that moment, protests have erupted throughout historical Palestine and beyond, also reaching Palestinian women of the diaspora. Not only did this eventful protest mark the resurgence of a wave of women’s protests in Palestine, but it also brought about the start of a new feminist and anticolonial movement: Tal’at. Using frame analysis to examine the movement’s declarations, Facebook posts, and the archival material available at the Basso Foundation Archive, together with firsthand data collected through interviews conducted during my fieldwork in Historical Palestine, I will try to answer the following questions: How does this new feminist protest-movement differ from the previous ones' What are the elements of continuity with previous Palestinian women’s movements' How did this movement manage to frame an aggregating message in such a fragmented territory' Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-04-17T05:50:34Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231164964
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Authors:Peter Ikeler Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Recent post-capitalist theorizing, particularly Winant, revives the question of service sector growth. At stake is whether an economic system built on the extraction of surplus value can continue to function when ever-larger shares of workers do not produce this; also, whether their growing predominance prefigures post-capitalist relations of production. Most contributions offer imprecise concepts of service work and capitalist productivity, however. This article sharpens these with Marxian theoretical tools and assesses them using 2016–2020 US Census data, finding that less than one-fifth of service employees produce surplus value, while nearly half of non-service employees do. The majority of service and all formal US employees create important use values outside of direct capitalist exploitation. They thus pose a potentially post-capitalist constituency that is heavily—and non-randomly—female and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). The implications of this for the transition away from capitalism, as well as for the transition debate itself, are then considered. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-04-15T04:49:43Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231164725
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Authors:Peter Ikeler Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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Authors:David Chen, Jason A. Miller, Mark Shakespear Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. When the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ has been applied to China, it has often been focused on the plight of ethnic minorities. The political and cultural subordination of non-Mandarin Han groups, however, has drawn little attention. We argue that critical Han studies, by posing a challenge to the state ideology of Han ethnic unitarism, provides a theoretical arsenal capable of broadening the application of the internal colonialism framework to the study of non-Mandarin Han groups and regions in China. To provide empirical support for our argument, we examine ethno-geographic representation among Chinese political elites. We find an internal heterogeneity and ethnic hierarchy between different Han groups who have integrated into the political ruling class of China, which is dominated by the Mandarins, to various extents: the Wu people of Shanghai and Zhejiang represent the top layer of the hierarchy; the Xiang of Hunan, the Hokkien of Fujian, and the Gan of Jiangxi constitute the intermediate layer; and the Cantonese and the Teochew of Guangdong belong to the bottom layer. These findings provide the basis for our discussion of internal colonization in China with a specific focus on Guangdong and Hong Kong. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-04-01T08:35:21Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231163896
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Authors:Jerome Braun Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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Authors:Gowoon Jung Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Scholars have debated whether hybrid masculinities perpetuate or challenge male dominance and power. This study advances such dialogue by unveiling the kernel of hybrid masculinities through careful examination of young Korean men’s narratives on how to manage appearance and dressing up, especially on wearing make-up. Findings suggest that young men narrate three approaches, namely, expressive, instrumental, and meritocratic, as a means to explain their perspectives on such practices. A close look into their statements on the rationales of dressing-up and wearing make-up—seemingly a social act of hybrid masculinities—shows that such behaviors are pathways to fortify masculine power whose roots intersect with the local socioeconomic structure. This study theoretically contributes to unveiling how the basis of male dominance and power intersects with the normative and pervasive ideal of the neoliberal self, suggesting traditional masculinities are concealed in the complex indigenous assemblage of neoliberalism and lookism. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-03-25T10:04:25Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231160295
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Authors:Joshua J. Watterton Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This analysis seeks to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical salience of the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ in relation to the concrete evolution of the US economy between 1950 and 2020. The theoretical-methodological approach adopted in this study is based on the work of Shane Mage and Murray E.G. Smith. This approach re-specifies the Marxian value categories and ratios for purposes of empirically operationalizing them as a theory of fundamental capitalist dynamics using national accounting data. Contributions include (1) the treatment of systemically necessary unproductive labour as a ‘constant capital overhead cost’ and (2) a method of managing ‘fictitious profits’ that are imputed into the national accounts and thereby enabling a more realistic estimate of ‘social surplus value’ (the numerator of the Marxian average rate of profit) in what has become an ‘era of fictitious capital’. The empirical findings reveal a persistent rise in the organic composition of capital, as well as a rise in the rate of surplus value, accompanied by a long-term downward trend in the average rate of profit in the postwar US economy. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-03-23T07:59:29Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231160744
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Authors:Alfredo Saad-Filho, Fernanda Feil Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Climate change and neoliberalism are threat multipliers: they combine risks, increase instability and penalise disproportionately poor countries and poor people by virtue of their greater vulnerability disruption. This article examines the complex relationships between neoliberalism and climate change, and outlines a democratic economic strategy (DES) to address the transition from neoliberalism to a more dynamic, progressive and egalitarian system of accumulation, and the ‘green’ transition from unsustainable fossil fuel-dependent patterns of production to more diversified and sustainable economies. Both transitions must be pursued immediately, rather than gradually, separately or sequentially, for reasons of efficiency, consistency and legitimacy: the green transition will carry heavy costs and bring difficult political and economic challenges. Public support to address them will be forthcoming only through a shared commitment to transcend the destructive, polluting, exclusionary and income-concentrating logic of neoliberalism. DES offers a pathway to address these challenges and build sustainable and democratic economies. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-03-21T12:43:48Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231160628
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Authors:Neal Harris Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified interest in alternatives to neoliberalism. One proposal that has been increasingly discussed by both academics and activists is the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This would typically see all citizens awarded a regular cash payment, without conditionality attached. While UBI thus deserves considerable attention from sociologists, as yet critical theorists have not offered an extended engagement with the proposal. In this paper, I provide exactly such a critical theoretical perspective on UBI, subjecting the approach to an extended critique. When viewed through the perspective of critical theory, UBI emerges as a more problematic approach to social change, failing to offer what its most enthusiastic progressive proponents promise: ‘a capitalist road to communism’. Rather, in this article, I argue that, when viewed through the lens of critical theory, UBI appears likely to further entrench, rather than disturb, the neoliberal social formation. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-03-11T05:22:28Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231151562
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Authors:Mehek Muftee Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. In a socio-political context where antimuslim racism has gained momentum, this article aims to understand Muslim women’s everyday life experiences of racialization in Sweden. More importantly, it aims to highlight what strategies are developed in order to navigate and counter these experiences. By using the concepts of double consciousness, orientations, and respectability together with an understanding of Muslims as a racialized category, the article shows how experiences of antimuslim racism are handled by the women in different ways, both on individual and collective level. Being a Muslim woman in Sweden requires developing strategies and sometimes engaging in respectability politics. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-03-06T09:28:05Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231158496
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Authors:Erdem Damar Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This study critically engages with the ‘end of neoliberalism’ debates which have peaked following the globally detrimental impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper suggests that crises of the pandemic predetermine neither the end of neoliberalism nor its regeneration. It is argued that ‘death or resurrection’ of neoliberalism is conditioned in the ways through which subjects experience ongoing crises and translate them into particular actions. On that basis, the paper focuses on Turkey’s labour regime under pandemic conditions to reveal how the imaginings and political practices of the Turkish state, companies, and (self-employed courier) workers regenerate the enduring principles of neoliberalism – including (global) market competitiveness, deregulation, labour market flexibility, economic individualism, and status-seeking – even in moments of crises. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on the emerging visibility of alternative modes of practices, which potentially involve new possibilities to mobilise towards post-neoliberal politics under crisis-ridden pandemic conditions. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-03-01T05:03:13Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231155930
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Authors:Tanetta Andersson Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This paper traces Palestinian women’s political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists’ analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-02-27T12:54:50Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231154616
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Authors:Raju J. Das Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Class struggle is a necessary aspect of society. While ordinary people engage in struggles to improve their conditions, economically powerful people engage in struggles to defend their privileges. Thus, class struggle is from below and from above. And, class struggle occurs over interests and over ideas. To reproduce capitalism, it is not enough that resources be in the hands of the top 1%–10% thus economically forcing the vast majority to rely on wage work, or that police be used against their picket lines. It is also necessary that a large number of common people must possess ideas that make them accept the existing mechanisms of society as natural or as inherently good for all. But, these ideas are challenged too, which is how ideological class struggle from below happens. Academia is a major site of ideological struggle. Generally, professors propagate ideas that justify the reproduction of capitalism as it is or in slightly modified forms. These ideas can be challenged by students. The main aim of this article is to briefly discuss the nature of ideological class struggle in academia and to present a series of questions from the standpoint of the students who can oppose many of the ideas circulating in academia. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-02-22T09:30:41Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231152560
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Authors:Oska Paul Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The City of Sanctuary (CoS) in the United Kingdom aims to create a culture of welcome for asylum seekers and refugees. This is a politically limited approach because it overlooks the effects of other hostile immigration policies. The emergence of the sanctuary movement as ‘Boroughs of Sanctuary’ (BoS) in London brings these shortcomings into sharp focus, as many residents have other precarious immigration statuses. This article examines the extent to which the Lewisham and Southwark BoS initiatives have successfully negotiated and reconfigured sanctuary at a local level to address this urban complexity. In doing so, it engages with different actors, institutions and factions involved in building sanctuary. While the CoS’ exclusionary politics of asylum is still being reproduced in many ways, people with precarious immigration status are co-opting and reconfiguring the sanctuary framework in ways that expand the asylum-oriented focus of the movement and address the broader violence of the hostile environment. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-02-14T10:28:18Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231151599
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Authors:Maja Breznik Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. The article develops the concept of ‘unfree wage labour’ that refers to a situation in which a worker must (temporarily and conditionally) give away possession of his labour power to a third party who then sells it to the buyers of labour power. From the perspective of contract freedom and legal equality, it seems irrelevant whether a worker sells his or her labour power to an employer or to an intermediary. However, there is no doubt that labour intermediation increases the economic dependence and social subordination of workers. First, given that the intermediary negotiates with the employer, the worker has a lower ability to influence the terms of employment. Second, given that he or she is a contract worker, they have a lower ability to engage in collective action in the company. Undoubtedly, this worker has significantly lower control over her or his working and living conditions. The question arises whether his or her contract freedom lessened to the extent that we can speak of unfree wage labour. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-02-07T09:04:20Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205231152914
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Authors:Abu Bakarr Bah, Ibrahim Bangura Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article is an ethnographic study that situates the caretaker phenomenon within the wider system of patrimonialism in Sierra Leone. It addresses the ways urban landholding creates a class of lumpen tenants and reproduces patrimonialism in postwar Sierra Leone. The article is based on select data regarding landholding in the environs of Freetown drawn from a larger study of youths and governance. The article shows that in Sierra Leone, patrimonialism, both in its private and state variants, is tied to corruption and economic and political exploitation. In addition, the dependency relationship between landowners and caretakers is a reflection of the unequal access to resources and the everyday application of power. The article points to various economic survival strategies of youths who have migrated to Freetown during and after the war. Moreover, it shows the ways youths build social capital within the patrimonial system of Sierra Leone. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-02-01T06:53:15Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221150492
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Authors:Watoii Rabii Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. Using content analysis of Buffalo media and 20 semi-structured interviews, I document the use of immigrant entrepreneurialism as a neoliberal urban governance strategy. Racism evasiveness is central to this strategy. I observe that immigrants and refugees are treated as symbolic capital as part of a neighborhood branding strategy that involves parlaying diversity into material benefits. I call this strategy global appeal. Buffalo’s resurgence is a feel-good story that draws on neoliberal market logics, colorblindness, and diversity ideology. These stories allow Whites to evade racism when discussing neighborhood renewal and racist comments. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, Bell’s concept of neighborhood frames, and Beeman’s theory of racism evasiveness, I argue that immigrants and refugees are used as symbolic capital to construct a neighborhood brand. This is part of a strategy of roll out neoliberalism that relies on two neighborhood frames: revitalization and diversity. The revitalization frame credits immigrants and refugees with contributing to the neighborhood through homeownership, entrepreneurialism, and school enrollment. The diversity frame celebrates people of different races, cultures, and ethnicities coming together while both evading and obscuring racism. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2023-01-12T11:42:13Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221146268
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Authors:Marie Moran, Eoin Flaherty Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. While the concept of a ‘financial elite’ has become prominent within politics and the social sciences, it is not clear what value it holds for the analysis of inequalities of income, wealth and power under financial capitalism. Who are the financial elite, and what distinguishes them from other economically powerful groups' We delineate ‘distributive’, ‘categorical’ and ‘relational’ approaches to financial elites, arguing that various unresolved tensions have hampered clarification of the differentia specifica of the concept, and blunted its normative significance. We develop a new concept of financial elites that combines insights from elite studies and financialisation studies. We argue that the financial elite possess not only high incomes, but income primarily derived from ‘rentier’ channels, as endowed by the institutional structures of financialisation. Financial elites demonstrate the capacity not only to capitalise on these new accumulation channels, but to shape the institutional and regulatory landscapes in which they operate. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-12-13T07:27:36Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221143317
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Authors:Yige Dong Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print. As the first ethnographic account of Foxconn in Zhengzhou—the world’s largest iPhone manufacturing base—this paper argues that a new labor regime features ‘hegemonic precarity’ has arisen since capital’s move to inland China. Despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits, inland Foxconn workers choose a more precarious employment status. I argue that this surprising pattern is a result of the interaction between dynamics at the point of production and that of social reproduction. Through the mechanism of ‘hoarding of time’, Foxconn’s management pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority’s wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in the realm of social reproduction makes Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. Working together, these factors have led to extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labor solidarity, and the rise of ‘gig manufacturing’ in China. Citation: Critical Sociology PubDate: 2022-12-07T09:58:21Z DOI: 10.1177/08969205221140927
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Authors:Raju J. Das Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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Authors:Aaron Major Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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Authors:Mouin Rabbani Abstract: Critical Sociology, Ahead of Print.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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