Toward a critical sociology of lifestyle migration: reconceptualizing migration and the search for a better way of life

This article places under critical and reflexive examination the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of lifestyle migration. Developed to explain the migration of the relatively affluent in search of a better way of life, this concept draws attention to the role of lifestyle within migration, alongside understandings of migration as one stage within the ongoing lifestyle choices and trajectories of individual migrants. Through a focus on two paradigms that are currently at work within theorizations of this social phenomenon – individualization and mobilities – we evaluate their contribution to this flourishing field of research. In this way, we demonstrate the limitations and constraints of these for understanding lifestyle migration; engaging with long‐standing debates around structure and agency to make a case for the recognition of history in understanding the pursuit of ‘a better way of life’; questioning the extent to which meaning is made through movement, and the politics and ethics of replacing migration with mobilities. Through this systematic consideration, we pave the way for re‐invigorated theorizing on this topic, and the development of a critical sociology of lifestyle migration.     

Toward a political sociology of privatized punishment: Contestation,state structures,and stratification

Privatized punishment—in which nonstate actors carry out state-mandated criminal punishments—has developed into a common practice since its rise in the 1980s. Many disciplines, including criminology, political science, public administration, and economics, have examined its use over the past four decades. However, privatized punishment has not garnered much attention in sociology. This is surprising, as privatized punishment touches on the key themes in sociology, and in the political sociology in particular. In this paper, we attempt to insert privatized punishment into classic and contemporary discussions in political sociology. Below, we offer an overview of privatized punishment and provide a high-level review of how other social scientific disciplines have studied the phenomenon. Then we argue that political sociology provides a useful, if underutilized, lens for studying privatized punishment. In particular, we highlight three political sociological themes—contestation, state structures, and stratification—that can be fruitfully applied to the study of privatized punishment, and we sketch multiple lines of future research informed by these themes.     

Lessons from a comparative study of user involvement

Abstract

Grounded in the context of the significant differences in service user involvement in social work education and research between the UK and Israel, a joint project between Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and Tel-Hai College in Israel was developed. Its aim was to develop a comparative research methodology to evaluate the outcomes of service user involvement in social work education. A main tenet of our research methodology consisted of partnering with a group of older people who used health and social care services as co-researchers from each country. This co-researching methodology together with the evaluation tools worked effectively in the two respective countries. The key findings highlight that while students in both countries valued the involvement of service users in their training, this occurred more so in Israel, where this is a very new development. Students in both countries developed rich concept maps illustrating the complexity of such an involvement. Yet, while the responses of both groups to vignettes describing user involvement scenarios reflected the positive impact of such an involvement, the UK students focused on the negative impact of potential risk more so than the Israeli students.     

Processes of social flourishing and their liminal collapse: elements to a genealogy of globalization

This article aims at exploring a long‐term historical perspective on which contemporary globalization can be more meaningfully situated. A central problem with established approaches to globalization is that they are even more presentist than the literature on modernization was. Presentism not only means the ignoring of history, but also the unreflective application to history of concepts taken from the study of the modern world. In contrast, it is argued that contemporary globalization is not a unique development, but rather is a concrete case of a historical type. Taking as its point of departure the spirit, rather than the word, of Max Weber, this article extends the scope of sociological investigation into archaeological evidence. Having a genealogical design and introducing the concept of ‘liminality’, the article approaches the modern process of globalization through reconstructing the internal dynamics of another type of historical change called ‘social flourishing’. Taking up the Weberian approach continued by Eisenstadt in his writings on ‘axial age’, it moves away from situations of crisis as reference point, shifting attention to periods of revival by introducing the term ‘epiphany’. Through the case of early Mesopotamia, it shows how social flourishing can be transmogrified into globalizing growth, gaining a new perspective concerning the kind of ‘animating spirit’ that might have driven the shift from Renaissance to Reformation, the rise of modern colonialism, or contemporary globalization. More generally, it will retrieve the long‐term historical background of the axial age and demonstrate the usefulness and importance of archaeological evidence for sociology.     

Coming of Age in the Bubble: Suburban Adolescents' Use of a Spatial Metaphor as a Symbolic Boundary

This article explores how suburban middle‐class adolescents use a spatial metaphor, “bubble,” as a symbolic boundary. The narratives about the bubble, collected through focus group discussions and ethnographic observations, show consensus among the teenagers about the socioeconomic and cultural superiority of the community, but they also reveal opposing views on its moral status. I also find that the teens use the same metaphor to draw moral distinctions among their peers, based on whether they align their identity with the norms and values the bubble symbolizes. I argue that the adolescents living in this community develop a strong place identity, even when they identify flaws with it, because their mundane references to the bubble provide them with an opportunity to critically examine the implication of their middle‐class status.     

Socio-historical paths of the male breadwinner model - an explanation of cross-national differences

It is often assumed that in the historical transformation to modern industrial society, the integration of women into the economy occurred everywhere as a three‐phase process: in pre‐modern societies, the extensive integration of women into societal production; then, their wide exclusion with the shift to industrial society; and finally, their re‐integration into paid work during the further course of modernization. Results from the author's own international comparative study of the historical development of the family and the economic integration of women have shown that this was decidedly not the case even for western Europe. Hence the question arises: why is there such historical variation in the development and importance of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family? In the article, an explanation is presented. It is argued that the historical development of the urban bourgeoisie was especially significant for the historical destiny of this cultural model: the social and political strength of the urban bourgeoisie had central societal importance in the imposition of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family as the dominant family form in a given society. In this, it is necessary to distinguish between the imposition of the breadwinner marriage at the cultural level on the one hand, and at the level of social practice in the family on the other.     

Testing the modernization hypothesis and the socialist ideology hypothesis: a comparative sibling analysis of educational attainment and occupational status

In this study, we present a comparative sibling analysis. This enables us to test two major social mobility hypotheses, i.e. the modernization hypothesis and the socialist ideology hypothesis. We employ survey data on brothers in England, Hungary, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, and the USA, covering a historical period from 1916 till 1990. Results show that the effects of parental social class on educational attainment are smaller in technologically advanced societies, and that the effects of parental social class on occupational status are smaller in social-democratic and communist societies. In addition, the total family impact on occupational status declines with modernization. But overall, we observe that the family of origin has not lost its importance for its sons' educational attainment and occupational status yet.     

Political talk on mobile instant messaging services: a comparative analysis of Germany,Italy, and the UK

Mobile instant messaging services (MIMS) are emerging as important digital environments in citizens’ everyday lives. We explore the use of MIMS for talking about politics with unique survey data on samples representative of Internet users in Germany, Italy, and the UK. First, we show that robust percentages of our respondents who use MIMS employ them for posting political messages and discussing politics. Second, we demonstrate that political talk on MIMS is positively associated with users’ tendency to censor themselves politically on social networking sites (SNS) and, to a lesser extent, with ideological extremism. Third, we find that the association between self-censorship on SNS and the likelihood of publishing political contents on MIMS is stronger for individuals living in former East Germany where, due to historical reasons, large segments of the population are reluctant to talk about politics in public. Our findings suggest that MIMS make a distinctive contribution to contemporary repertoires of political talk, with important implications for the quality and inclusiveness of interpersonal political discussion.