Inequalities in social capital and their longitudinal effects on the labour market entry

This study investigates socio-economic and ethnic inequalities in social capital and their effects on the process of the labour market entry. We use longitudinal data about the transition from school to work of lower- and middle educated young people in Belgium. Social capital is measured with three robust position generator measures. In line with previous studies, there are substantial socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in the access to social capital. Ethnic differences in social capital are, however, due to the socio-economic deprivation of ethnic minority groups in Belgium. Among the specific population of lower- and middle educated youth, knowing more people from the working class leads to a higher likelihood of entering the labour market versus continuing in education, whereas knowing more people from the higher service class results in a lower likelihood of entering the labour market. Especially the resources of strong ties such as relatives and friends are important for these decisions. In addition, once entered the labour market, social capital has an impact on the likelihood of getting a job. Lower- and middle educated labour market entrants who know more people from the working class are more likely to find work, whereas knowing people from the lower service class decreases the job chances. However, there is no evidence for social capital effects on the occupational status of the job among our population.     

The consequences of love: young people and family practices in difficult circumstances

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

The cloud factory: Making things and making a living with desktop 3D printing

This paper presents a case study of an open-source 3D printer called ‘Rep-rap’. 3D printing derives from computer numerical control machinery, a technology first introduced against a background of industrial conflict. This historical fact reactualises labour process theory as a theoretical resource. However, the hobbyists in the Rep-rap project are located ‘outside’ the typical setting studied in labour process theory, that is, the workplace. The case study is, therefore, suitable for examining the limits of labour process theory. Its key tenet regarding structured antagonism between labour and capital is put to the test when the ‘point of production’ is located in a community and ‘labour’ consists in non-remunerated contributions by hobbyists (i.e. non-employees). Drawing on theories of the social factory and free labour in the cultural sector, the article argues that this is changing as hobbyists, fans, makers, etc., are put to work by start-up firms and venture capital in the so-called “sharing economy.”     

Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina

Abstract

Sex work has been identified as an important dimension of the ‘survival circuits’ which have developed in the majority world in the context of neo-liberalisation, as a response to the deepening misery of the Global South. Yet while much research has explored the role of sex work in contexts of ‘neo-liberal’ regimes of capital accumulation, few have paid sustained attention to sex work in regimes which are not purely ‘neo-liberal’. Drawing on data with sex workers across 10 cities in Argentina gathered between 2007 and 2014, this article examines multiple spaces of sex workers' lives, including the workplace, the home, and the state in a context of what has been dubbed ‘neo-developmentalism’. It argues that sex work contributes multiple forms of value and subsidies for the state and capital. First, sex work provides a subsidy in the form of the provision of ‘employment’; second, female sex workers provide unwaged reproductive labour in the family; and third, in the labour movement. Yet despite these three contributions to the reproduction of the working class and therefore of capital, the state undermines sex workers' capacities through violence and sustained repression. The article concludes that the neo-developmentalism has led to ‘uneven divestment of the state’ in the reproduction of particular sections of the working class, namely those outside the formal and ‘productive’ sectors.     

The North American Free Trade Agreement and Women

This article discusses some of the effects of NAFTA on women workers in Canada and Mexico. The main purpose is to show that NAFTA represents a continuation of the capitalist dynamic, which is characterized by the enormous mobility of capital across countries and regions, and which privileges the search for profit. Through an analysis of the labour conditions in Canadian and Mexican manufacturing, the article reveals how this new capitalist period has produced de-industrialization in developed countries while depressing labour conditions in both developed and developing countries. The study indicates that women workers most affected in this process are those working in industries (especially the clothing industry) that seek to reduce their costs of production in order to remain competitive in national and international markets. In addition, those working in regions important to transnational industries, such as the Mexican Free Zones where maquiladoras abound are also seriously affected.     

The subcontracting of cleaning work: a case in the casualisation of labour*

Casual labour is defined in this article as labour lacking security of income and employment. It is argued that such labour has remained an integral type of labour organization in modern capitalist economies, and has even been expanding both in advanced and declining sectors. The article studies in detail one specific process of casualisation-the transition to subcontracting in the case of cleaning work, as it took place in Israel. The major considerations leading to such a transition are specified - the desire to cut costs and to find new sources of labour. The basic differences between subcontracted labour and direct wage labour are discussed, focusing on the intensification of labour, the deterioration of wages and benefits and the obstacles to workers organization. The relation is then examined between subcontracted labour and the composition of the labour force, primarily the displacement of Jewish by Arab women workers and the differentiation which has developed between groups of subcontracted workers on the basis of gender, nationality and citizenship. The role of the state and the labour movement in this process of casualisation is highlighted throughout the discussion. Concluding with some final comments of the more general significance of casual labour for the highly organized Israeli labour force and working class.     

Fashioning Futures: Life Coaching and the Self‐Made Identity Paradox

Contemporary processes of individualization push people to construct single‐handedly their own identities. This urge runs counter to a fundament of sociology, which proposes that identities are social products that must be validated through social relations. Based on participant observation and in‐depth interviews with life coaches and their clients, I investigate life coaching as a social institution that aims to resolve the paradoxical nature of the desire for self‐creation. Locating life coaching in the larger identity‐fashioning market, this article illustrates how the artificial nature of outsourced social relations reconciles two apparently contradictory desires: the “need for help” and “wanting to find it on my own.” Three mechanisms are involved: creating an independent social space where identities can be crafted away from significant others; deliberately deemphasizing the coach and intentionally underwriting personal authorship; and encouraging clients to root identities in the social world while promoting an instrumental view of sociality. The article discusses the blurring of boundaries between intimate social relations and utilitarian market logic, and the implications of the ongoing outsourcing of identity support that reinforces the privileged ideal of self‐made identities.     

Middle class identities in a neoliberal age: tensions between contested authenticities

This paper explores in‐depth interviews on aspects of middle class identity in a neoliberal age, taking the case of Chile's rapid and stark transition to a neoliberal economic model which was imposed by a dictatorship but later reproduced during democracy. ¹ The paper reveals that there are no challenges to middle class identities (eg from the working class, or peasants). In this respect, these are neo‐liberal middle class identities in that their way of thinking is preconditioned by market dominance. Informed by Bourdieu's views on class identities, this article emphasises the horizontal, non‐hierarchical nature of contemporary class taste, and contributes to debates on stratification and culture, settling accounts with older class theory which perceives contests between the popular and middle classes. Notwithstanding this, however, I argue that processes of horizontal differentiation do involve tensions between cultural and moral boundaries. This article therefore also offers an alternative approach for exploring how middle class identities experience processes of individualization. It is argued that individualization processes should be placed in social and ethical registers as they could be in tension with various ways of understanding authenticity: being true to oneself or to one's origins.     

Small Towns in Turkey: Footnotes in Somebody Else's History

This article follows the trajectories by which modernity and development in Turkey have been constituted as an antagonism between villages and cities. Both inspired, albeit in opposing ways, modernising/ developmental ideals, and constituted the true locus of nationalist discourses. Meanwhile, small towns with shrinking populations, low-level capital accumulation and limited jobs have been left invisible. They have been depicted as irrelevant places of the same essence, which had nothing to add to the story. As such, the article is an analysis of how the Republican history is constructed as a narrative of an antagonism between the West and the East, backwardness and progress, modern and non-modern. What follows is an exploration of how provincial places and people, which are lumped together on either side of these binaries, are left out, silenced or marginalized.     

Structuration of Indian Information Technology Professionals’ Migration to Australia: An Ethnographic Study

Information Technology (IT) is leading to a new form of capital accumulation as is clearly evident in the IT industry. Regardless of its origin and amount, capital can be circulated and accumulated on a global scale, at an unprecedented speed and therefore with extreme volatility. An urgent task of the study of globalization and migration is to understand the international labour system of the “new economy”. This article is an ethnographic study of those agents who have been the main means by which Indian IT professionals move globally. “Body shopping” is the practice whereby a firm recruits IT workers and then farms them out to clients for a particular project, though the firm itself is not involved in the project. The key players in “body shopping” are a series of recruitment agents. They form “agent chains” where they depend on each other and assume different functions in dealing with the market, the state and the workers. “Body shops” rely on ethnic networks. Their practices have led to the emergence of a flexible international labour supply system that benefits some IT professionals but also imposes costs.     

‘The Worst Thing is the Screwing’ (2): Context and Career in Sex Work

This article, and an earlier linked one, focus on the labour process of the modern Western female prostitute. Drawing on available qualitative research from the United Kingdom and Australia, and research undertaken by one of the authors in New South Wales, we argue here that the ways in which individual prostitutes understand themselves, the work that they do and their relationships with clients are at least partly informed by the discursive context of their labour. We seek to highlight the variety of discourses which currently give shape to prostitution in the modern West, and in so doing discuss the ways in which individual workers may engage with these discourses to make sense of their life‐world — for example, whether they understand themselves as victims of patriarchy or as feminist activists. In this second article, then, our focus moves from the encounter between the client and the prostitute to the prostitute's career, and we provide a discussion of the various ways of understanding how and why prostitutes enter the profession, how and why they stay in it, how and why they exit this occupational field and how and why they understand themselves in particular ways following such an exit.     

Family Migration as a Class Matter

Traditionally, family migration was conceptualized as a separate form of migration from labour migration. Increasingly socio‐economic criteria (labour market participation, language competence, financial resources, independence from welfare), have been applied to family migration policies in Europe, and are harder to fulfil by those with a weaker labour market position. Hence class now plays an increasingly significant role in stratifying the right to family migration. The article examines the imposition of minimum income requirements in three countries – the Netherlands, Norway and the UK – and the significance of class in its economic and cultural dimensions in meeting the requirement. For those without sufficient economic capital to meet the requirement, cultural capital may facilitate the development of coping strategies to overcome or reduce the duration of family separation. Class is not the only stratifying element: gender, age and ethnicity interact with and reinforce the effects of class.     

Performing Women: The Gendered Dimensions of the UK New Research Economy

This article explores the development and maintenance of familiar gendered employment patterns and practices in UK universities, which are exemplars of new modes of knowledge production, commodification and marketization. After discussing in detail the evidence of gender discrimination in UK higher education and the changes in the academic labour process consequent to the incorporation of universities, at least at the policy level, into the ‘knowledge economy’, institution‐specific data is used to highlight the gendered aspects of the research economy from the three intermeshing perspectives of research culture, research capital and the research production process. This nexus is constructed in such a way as to systematically militate against women's full and equal involvement in research. Lack of transparency, increased competition and lower levels of collegiate activity coupled with networking based on homosociability are contributing to a research production process where women are marginalized.     

WWW.FAITH.ORG (Re)structuring communication and the social capital of religious organizations

This paper examines the relationships between Internet and social capital building within religious organizations, which are relatively understudied foci. Building upon theoretical insights provided by new institutionalism and recent research on the Internet, social capital and religion, this article explores the ways in which religious organizations have (re)structured their norms, values, and practices of religious community in light of the incorporation of the Internet into their congregational life. Drawing from interviews conducted with Christian and Buddhist religious leaders in Toronto, this article discusses three major relationships in which the effects of the Internet on social capital may be understood, that is, complementary, transformative, and perverse relationships. Religious organizations are traditionally associated with relatively high stocks of social capital, yet findings here suggest that their communicative norms, values, and practices are changing to a varying extent. The results also indicate that the relationship between the Internet and social capital building is largely complementary; however, the Internet is perceived by some to be a 'mixed blessing', facilitating the potential transformation of organizational practices that affect community norms while leading to the dispersion of religious ties that could undermine community solidarity. Thus, contrary to earlier studies that have documented no evidence of innovations involving the reconfiguration of organizational practices and the adjustment of mission or services, findings here illustrate how some religious organizations have expanded the scope of their calling and restructured their communicative practices to spur administrative and operational effectiveness. Like other organizations, religious organizations are not insulated from technological changes including those associated with the Internet. This study clarifies and identifies key ways in which the distinct spirituality, cultural values, and institutional practices and norms of religious organizations influence communication processes that constitute bridging and bonding forms of social capital in this dot.org era of faith.     

“Migrant Capital” and Domestic Work: Labour Trajectories of Immigrant Women in Spain

This article analyses the labour trajectory of migrant women in domestic service. The research considers women's working conditions upon arrival, or their “migrant capital” (i.e. their human, social and economic capital) as the defining factors in their labour trajectories. The study, conducted on a sample of migrant women in domestic service, reveals the different value each type of capital has at each stage of a labour trajectory. The social network is the core capital in their first job. Nevertheless, the key factors in labour mobility are human capital and a household's financial needs. The processes of administrative regularization and family reunification prompt far‐reaching changes in these women's labour trajectories. Finally, labour trajectories during the economic crisis have been shaped by financial needs, leading to a decapitalization of the human capital acquired, with even legal status surrendering its value.     

Creative precarity? Young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the careers of young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia. It discusses entrepreneurial experiences and labour practices of fashion designers in the context of precarity: that is, the structural conditions characterized by a lack of social, economic and emotional security caused by a shift of responsibilities for the labour market from the state to the citizens. The article takes the perspective of designers’ agency and answers the question of how young fashion entrepreneurs deal with such structural conditions using state support, community support, organizational practices and emotional management. The article also focuses on creative labour in the broader context of the circumstances of a creative class in an authoritarian state. We argue that in today’s Russia, the discourse on the creative class is perhaps more important than the discourse on precarity, since belonging to the creative class is a source of political identity for fashion designers. The issue of precarity, then, can become a further basis for solidarity and political action. The research draws from 21 in-depth interviews with fashion designers and experts conducted in the cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk between 2015 and 2016.     

Mapping Social Capital: A Critical Contextual Approach For Working With Low-Status Families

Promoting justice in therapeutic work with families demands an analysis of contextual factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class in relationship to societal systems of power, privilege, and oppression. A broad understanding of these dynamics, however, is inadequate to inform our work with families whose social capital severely limits available life choices, social influence, and material resources. In this article, we describe working from a critical contextual perspective to consider how families gain and/or lose social capital through participation in multiple contexts. We introduce a technique for mapping social capitol within and across multiple systems as well as suggestions for interventions aimed at increasing the social well-being of low-status families. These include considering the dynamics of boundary crossing, recognizing and optimizing resistance to oppressive dynamics, finding ways to limit constraints and optimize opportunities, and developing webs of allies to support family functioning and access to resources. We offer the example of 13-year-old Pepe as a case in point.     

Do ‘his’ education and class matter? The changing effect of the husband on women's labour‐market transitions in Italy and Britain

A new stream of sociological and demographic theory emphasizes individualization as the key process in late modernity. As maintained by Hakim ( 2000 ), women also have increasingly become agents of their own biographies, less influenced by the social class and the family. In this study, I intend to contribute to this debate by analysing how, in Italy and Britain, women's movements between employment and housework are linked to their husband's education and class, and how this link has changed across cohorts. Using discrete‐time event‐history modelling on the BHPS and ILFI, my findings show that in both countries, if the woman's educational and labour‐market profile is controlled for, the husband's occupation and education have lost importance. Yet, although based more on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile, divisions along ‘classic’ lines are still evident and not context‐free, and they assume different forms in the two countries with distinctive institutional and cultural settings. In ‘liberal’ Britain, women's labour‐market participation responds more to motherhood and class than to education, while in ‘familistic’ Italy education seems more important, which suggests the existence of returns over and above strictly human capital/economic ones.     

‘It's People's Whole Lives’: Gender,Class and the Emotion Work of User Involvement in Mental Health Services

The concept of emotion work has been widely applied to the study of service work. Yet its use in understanding the social dynamics of user involvement in public services remains under explored. Drawing on a study of user involvement in mental health service development, I show its utility for understanding this social and political realm. The article discusses findings from a critical discursive and contextual emotional labour perspective, taking into account organizational and institutional factors as well as social structural dimensions of gender and social class. It shows how discourses on emotion, constructed through articulation of personal experiences of service usage both reflected and constructed the ideological and structural positionings of women service users, while emotional discourse — displays of anger in user involvement forums — worked to constitute traditionally male and ideologically masculine elements of the field, as well as the working‐class identities of some participants. These forms of emotion work, and the ways in which they elicited further emotion management from service users and workers alike, are located in relation to the rules of engagement of user involvement and the bureaucratic institutional forms within which this took place. The article concludes that the emotion work of user involvement ultimately helped to reproduce the dominant institutional and social order, including its gender and class dimensions. Implications for policies and practices of user involvement in mental health services are provided.