British Journal of Sociology

We use data from a large-scale and nationally representative survey to examine whether there is in Britain a trade-off between social diversity and social cohesion. Using six separate measures of social cohesion (generalised trust, volunteering, giving to charity, inter-ethnic friendship, and two neighbourhood cohesion scales) and four measures of social diversity (ethnic fractionalisation, religious fractionalisation, percentage Muslim, and percentage foreign-born), we show that, net of individual covariates, there is a negative association between social diversity and most measures of social cohesion...

We present the first comprehensive set of estimates of variation in intergenerational social mobility across regions of Great Britain using data from the UK Labour Force Survey. Unlike the Social Mobility Index produced by the Social Mobility Commission, we focus directly on variation in measures of intergenerational social class mobility between the regions in which individuals were brought up. We define regions using the NUTS classification and we consider three levels, from 11 large NUTS1 regions, to 168 NUTS3 regions, across England, Wales, and Scotland...

A variety of theories have been proposed to explain why states pass legislation to regulate professional groups, and why, more recently, they have acted to curtail professional privileges. While these theories have drawn attention to the importance of power dynamics and public protection, among other factors, the role of political interests has been downplayed. This article builds on ecological theory to argue that, with some modifications, the theory illuminates the centrality of state-profession relations and politics to regulatory change...

This study examines the unique contributions of parental wealth, class background, education, and income to different measures of educational attainment. We build on recent sibling correlation approaches to estimate, using Norwegian register data, the gross and net contribution of each social origin dimension across almost 3 decades of birth cohorts. Our findings suggest that parental education is crucial for all measures of children's educational outcomes in all models. In the descriptive analyses, we find that while broad education measures remain stable or decrease over time, attaining higher tertiary education and elite degrees is more stable or increasingly dependent on family background, especially parental financial resources...

Social and spatial mobility have been subject to substantial recent sociological and policy debate. Complementing other recent work, in this paper we explore these patterns in relation to higher education. Making use of high-quality data from the higher education statistics agency (HESA), we ran a set of multilevel models to test whether the local authority areas where young people grow up influence social and spatial mobility into a higher professional or managerial job on graduation. We found entry to these patterns reflect pre-existing geographies of wealth and income, with more affluent rural and suburban areas in South-East England having higher levels of entry to these occupations...

People living with cognitive impairments face new forms of disablement in the context of transport digitalisation, an issue recently catalysed by controversies regarding rail ticket office closures. Transport can dramatically impact the lives of people diagnosed with dementia, who often find their mobility suddenly and dramatically impaired. Unfortunately, sociological analysis of cognitive disability has traditionally been undermined by under-theorisation. One solution can be found in classic bioethical work on hypercognitivism-the veneration of cognitive acuity-and its disabling consequences...

How do parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement? While extensive research examines the causes of gender disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, we know much less about the factors that constrain women's advancement in the social sciences. Combining detailed career- and administrative register data on 976 Danish social scientists in Business and Management, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology (5703 person-years) that obtained a PhD degree between 2000 and 2015, we estimate gender differences in attainment of senior research positions and parse out how publication outputs, parenthood and parental leave contribute to these differences...

Research on the influence of family background on college graduates' earnings has not considered the importance of the match between parents' and children's field of study. Using a novel design based on within-family comparisons, I examine long-term earnings returns to reproducing parents' field of study in Denmark. I find that individuals whose field of study matches that of a parent have earnings that are 2 percent higher than those of their siblings with college degrees in different fields, on average. Earnings returns to field inheritance are highest in the fields of law (9 percent), medicine (6 percent), and engineering (4 percent) and are driven mainly by income from self-employment...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

We analyze 391 news reports in Israeli newspapers between 2013 and 2015, covering murders of women and their family members by other family members and intimate partners. We compare articles where the perpetrators and victims are Jewish to those where the perpetrators and victims are Palestinian citizens of Israel (henceforth PCI). We found that articles tend to provide much more details about Jewish culprits than about PCI ones. As for ascribed motives, most murder cases by Jews were framed as an outcome of individual personality or the pathology of the culprit...

Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers' life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages...

Recent in-depth qualitative research indicates that different people ascribe different meanings to their apparently similar stances on immigrants' entitlement to welfare. We are the first to investigate such variation quantitatively among the public-at-large, applying the novel method Correlational Class Analysis to an original survey fielded among a representative sample in the Netherlands (n = 2138). We uncover five ways of looking at immigrants' entitlement to welfare, each including both people who oppose that entitlement and those who support it...

There appears to be a mismatch between apparent incompetence in the world and the amount of sociological research it attracts. The aim of this article is to outline a sociology of incompetence and justify its value. I begin by defining incompetence as unsatisfactory performance relative to standards. Incompetence is thus intrinsically sociological in being negotiated and socially (re)constituted. The next section foregrounds how widespread and serious incompetence is. This renders effective sociological understanding crucial to welfare...

This article examines how social disparities in dropout rates vary by educational field. Previous studies have shown that first-generation students, in general, have lower higher education completion rates than their fellow students. Less is known, however, about how such disparities vary between educational fields. We distinguish between general and field specific cultural capital and find that general cultural capital mainly operates through academic preparedness in upper secondary school, and after controlling for upper secondary school grade point average (GPA), students with parents with higher education degrees in a different field than themselves do not complete their degrees more often than first-generation students...

Social practice theory (SPT) represents a growing body of research that takes the 'doings and sayings' (social practices) of everyday life as its core unit of enquiry. Time use surveys (TUS) represent a substantial source of micro-data regarding how activities are performed across the 24-h day. Given their apparent complementarities, we ask why TUS have not been utilised more extensively within SPT-inspired research. We advance two contentions: (1) ontological tensions obscure the relevance of TUS data in addressing core SPT research questions, and (2) SPT concepts do not readily translate for application in TUS analysis...

The field of research in evaluating and applying Bourdieu's theories has seen growing interests in studying how the formation and effect of cultural capital vary in different contexts and fields. While existing studies have increasingly focussed on evaluating the role of cultural capital in creating educational inequalities in the Chinese context, little is known about how activities and taste are valued in the Chinese labour market. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 73 recruiters in elite professional firms in China, this article presents a study on how recruiters interpret physically exertive extracurricular activities (ECAs) for graduate hiring...

While gender inequalities in employment (paid public work) and domestic and reproductive labour (unpaid private work) are a prominent focus within the sociological literature, gender inequalities in volunteering (unpaid public work) have received much less scholarly attention. We analyse a unique longitudinal dataset of volunteer leaders, that follows through time every individual to have served as a board member (trustee) for a charity in England and Wales between 2010 and 2023, to make three foundational contributions to our understanding of gender inequalities in unpaid public work...

In the UK, there has been a significant increase in strike activity since the summer of 2022. Due to these increased levels of strike activity, it is logical for academics and policy makers to turn to the official data on labour disputes to help us understand what has been happening. Strikes remain of core sociological interest, yet are under researched in this journal. This research note briefly examines the recent strike wave in the UK drawing on data from the Office for National Statistics. The limitations of these data are outlined before consideration is given to other potential sources of data on labour disputes...

This research note provides an overview of Radicalisation Studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field aimed at developing more holistic understandings of how and why individuals and groups turn to extreme ideologies and political violence. It traces the evolution of radicalisation research across core social science disciplines, including sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science. While this burgeoning scholarship has expanded knowledge, persistent gaps remain due to studying radicalisation in disciplinary silos...