This study examines the community foundations of right-wing radicalization in the United States. Using county-level data, we compare the socio-demographic, economic, and political profiles of communities where two types of right-wing radicals originated—individuals arrested at the January 6th Capitol Insurrection and violent right-wing extremists—with those of the broader U.S. population. Although both groups differ from the national average, important variations emerge between them. Further disaggregation of the Capitol arrestees by prior extremist affiliations reveals these differences are accounted for primarily by “new” radicals. Our findings point to distinct yet evolving ecologies of radicalization and underscore the need for prevention models that readily account for heterogeneity among right-wing radicals, as well as theoretical frameworks capable of explaining their divergent roots.
Do immigrants develop trust in institutions and trust in people at the same rate? Using World Values Survey Wave 7 data from 21 countries (N = 33,929), this study demonstrates that they do not. Within countries, immigrants score 0.14 points higher than natives on institutional trust but only 0.03 points higher on social trust, producing a fivefold asymmetry we term differential trust incorporation. This pattern reflects different production functions: institutional trust is built through transactions with legible, standardized procedures accessible to newcomers, while social trust requires accumulated relational experience that takes longer to develop. Crucially, the gap narrows with integration. Naturalized citizens show gaps 51% smaller than noncitizens, and second-generation immigrants show gaps indistinguishable from natives. The gap also widens in stronger institutional environments, suggesting immigrants respond to actual institutional characteristics rather than projecting generalized optimism. These findings reframe immigrant trust from a deficit model to a temporal incorporation framework.
Public toilet closures in the UK, driven by austerity, have led to increasing reliance upon private or commercial facilities, such as toilets in bars and cafes. The extra labour required to maintain and monitor these toilets became especially visible under COVID-19 restrictions. This article shares reflections from a project exploring the impact of additional cleaning and monitoring of customer toilets in the hospitality sector during the pandemic. We use in-depth sociological narratives from two hospitality workers to explore their role as ‘gatekeepers’ in maintaining toilet spaces and facilitating access to essential provisions. We argue that council toilet closures have turned the hospitality sector into social infrastructure, whereby some workers see themselves as providing essential welfare facilities, while others struggle to decide who should be granted access to customer toilets and find that monitoring access creates a risk of abuse. Using street-level bureaucracy theory, we show how this gatekeeper role puts the onus on hospitality workers to make difficult, individualised decisions and shifts attention from the urgent need for unquestionable access to free, publicly funded toilets.
In the UK, higher education (HE) is often valorised as a ticket to social mobility, assuming that working-class individuals aspire to move ‘up’ and ‘out of’ their class. This article explores the impact of stigma and how theoretically ‘productive’ stigmatising narratives can be in getting factions of the working class to seemingly help themselves out of poverty. To do so, it draws upon the narratives of working-class single mothers on an Access to HE course in England. It links classed and gendered dimensions of stigma to explain aspirations for HE framed in terms of desires to remove stigmatising labels, rather than moving ‘up’ or ‘away’ from their class. Education served as a way for these mothers to present a refined moral character and create distinction between themselves and ‘other’ single mothers, while unconsciously perpetuating the very stigmatisation they despised. This article contributes to an understanding of how class is felt as much as it is socially and economically organised and shows how class divisions and stigmas are maintained not just through material inequalities but also through emotional and embodied experiences.
A recent and compelling discussion advanced understandings of political imagination and social change, calling for sociology to have a greater role in analysing the dynamics between them. The present article addresses this discussion through exploring Bruno Latour’s agency and New Climatic Regime concepts with regard to potential critical analyses of discourse surrounding the environmental and climate crisis, centred here on dualistic constructions of Nature and society’s relation to it represented by a ‘landscape’ lens. It creates a novel conversation between Latour and Alain Touraine’s focus on social conflict, where values and knowledge are contested. The result is a way of studying the dominant values, perceptions and practices concerning human-Nature relationships, as well as possibilities to challenge and re-negotiate these through social change in light of environmental and climate challenges, contributing to sociology’s positioning in political imagination research.
Aging-in-place is a central concept in gerontology, yet its underlying assumptions about family support, territorial stability, and care provision are increasingly challenged in contexts of migration. This study examines how aging-in-place is constructed through social capital and welfare structures among older migrant women living alone. Drawing on in-depth interviews with eight widowed migrant women aged 65 and older residing in Germany and the Netherlands, the article adopts a life-course and transnational perspective to explore later-life living and care arrangements. The findings show that aging-in-place is not primarily sustained through kin-based care, but through locally embedded social capital developed over time. Participants actively reconfigured social support after widowhood, shifting from family-centered ties in the country of origin to neighborly, peer-based, and civic relationships in the host country. Neighbors emerged as key sources of everyday support, safety, and belonging—often more central than adult children. Welfare regimes further shaped these experiences by providing formal resources that women strategically combined with informal support to maintain autonomy. By centering the voices of older migrant women, this study contributes a gendered and relational understanding of aging-in-place that moves beyond narratives of dependency and isolation. It highlights the interconnected roles of social capital, place, and welfare in later life and calls for aging and care policies that recognize non-kin networks, welfare and diverse life-course trajectories.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed multiple uncertainties shaping scientific reasoning, institutional coordination, and public communication. This article examines how three expert communities in Greece – clinicians, laboratory scientists, and institutional public health officials – constructed and communicated uncertainty. Drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews conducted between January and October 2024, we analyze how uncertainty was perceived, tolerated, and operationalized under urgent decision-making conditions. We introduce the concept of deep science communication to describe iterative, and trust-based exchanges through which experts construct and align knowledge under uncertainty. Our findings show that clinicians relied on heuristics and peer networks to adapt treatment without clear guidelines; laboratory scientists recalibrated protocols without standardized benchmarks; and institutional experts balanced internal pluralism with public coherence to maintain trust. These patterns show that tolerating uncertainty is an active, institutionally mediated process that turns ambiguity into coordinated action. The Greek case illustrates how expert practices, shaped by institutions and crisis pressures, addressed immediate challenges while redefining trust, authority, and knowledge in public life.
This article analyses memory practices developed by sectors of the Colombian exile during the Havana Peace Talks and the mandate of the Truth Commission (CEV). It examines how women and LGBTIQ+ people mobilised memory as a form of transnational political agency to intervene in transitional justice processes and challenge state-centred and territorially bounded frameworks of historical memory. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the study engages debates in memory studies, political transnationalism, and feminist and queer scholarship. The findings show that exile-based initiatives produced autonomous memory practices “from below and from outside” that disrupted long-standing institutional silences surrounding exile as a form of political victimisation. These practices rendered visible gendered and sexualised experiences of violence marginalised in earlier memory frameworks. They also foregrounded the body, affect, and care-based methodologies as key infrastructures of memory-making and transnational continuity. The analysis identifies internal tensions linked to the institutionalisation of gender perspectives and the centrality of motherhood, which generated new boundaries of recognition for queer and trans experiences. Memory produced from exile emerges as a generative sociological site through which historical memory, harm, and political legitimacy are reconfigured.
This article examines the algorithmic construction and dissemination of counter-narratives regarding touristification in the city of Naples, Italy. In recent years, Naples has experienced a dramatic increase in tourist flows, driven by low-cost mobility, short-term rentals, and the algorithmic amplification of urban imaginaries on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Drawing on a content analysis of posts published on these platforms, the study investigates how their logics shape the visibility and legitimacy of urban discourses. The article examines the dynamics of algorithmic touristification, the symbolic appropriation of tourist aesthetics by critical actors, and the emergence of digitally mediated forms of resistance. The findings highlight the epistemic asymmetries embedded in platform infrastructures, showing how celebratory narratives of tourism tend to dominate digital space, while dissenting voices are systematically marginalized. However, the analysis also reveals the presence of sophisticated counter-strategies that allow activists to reclaim algorithmic visibility and contest hegemonic representations.
This study examines the impact of social structures on economic outcomes, with a focus on norms, ties, structural holes, and social embeddedness. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research explores new data and findings related to the digital transformation of the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated the integration of technology into daily life, enabling merchants to conduct economic activities and consumers to fulfill their daily needs online. The digital transformation is observed across the distribution, production, and consumption sectors, driven by heightened demand for essential goods, including clothing from textile and garment products. This research contributes to the literature on the intersection of social structures and economic outcomes in the context of the digital economy.
In this article, we take inspiration from Graham Crow’s call for a sociology of endings, which we regard as an important yet overlooked contribution to contemporary sociology in an age characterised by closure, loss, and decline. Drawing from an ongoing study of the social and cultural impacts of pub closure in the UK, the article presents reflections on our engagement with endings as a sociological topic. We focus on the temporal and affective nature of endings, suggesting that the ambiguous characteristics of both make studying endings fascinating and complex. We propose that sociologies of ending might take the form of hagiography, valediction, and elegy, each of which presents a different mode of attending to the temporalities, affective charges, and sociological significance of endings.
This paper explores how parents construct and manage risks in their children’s post-digital lives, including how they respond to news media, public discourse, and everyday concerns about online safety and well-being. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study conducted with 30 parents in England, we analyse how risk is framed through spatial, symbolic, and relational logics that reflect broader socio-cultural anxieties. While digital risks are typically framed as distinct and exceptional, our findings suggest parents struggle to sustain clear boundaries between online and offline harms. We identify four interrelated themes: how parents distinguish between online and offline risks; how threats are imagined as both close to home and distant; how digital life produces uncertainty about what is real or trustworthy; and how parents develop different strategies for managing their children’s digital lives depending on their experiences, emotions, and resources. These findings are situated within the ecological and post-digital theoretical frameworks, highlighting how parental sense-making is shaped not only by digital technologies but also by emotional labour, cultural narratives, and institutional failures. We argue that risk is not simply managed at the individual or family level but negotiated within complex social ecologies. The paper contributes to digital parenting, childhood risk, and the post-digital condition, calling for responses that move beyond binary logics and recognise the interdependent, emotionally charged and structurally embedded nature of contemporary parenting.
This article reflects on the state of sociological research craft and the importance of SRO as a publication space that has fostered research innovation and invention for 30 years. Drawing on the author’s own experience of publishing in the journal since 2002, the author develops an argument for the vitality of sociological craft today that operates both within and beyond the text. Despite the austere atmosphere in UK Higher Education, it argues that we are experiencing a contemporary renaissance in qualitative research.
Studies on social mobility, particularly those with quantitative orientation, often present mobility rates without accounting for the contextual continuity in which individual life and career trajectories develop. Yet, social structure is not a static backdrop upon which individuals act. This study argues that processes of political, legal, and economic transformation can reconfigure structures of inequality, shift hierarchies, and alter corresponding rewards, thereby reshaping the set of possible pathways and strategies available to individuals. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with individuals who migrated from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s, this article explores how social transformations in both countries have shaped their status-related decisions and mobility strategies over time. The findings reveal that participants’ career trajectories are fragmented and complex rather than linear, constantly recalibrated in relation to shifting social contexts. Like the branches of a tree, these trajectories reach crosspoints that prompt individuals to rethink, reconsider, and reevaluate their aspirations and decisions. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of how mechanisms transporting individuals from origins to destinations function under evolving historical conditions. Ultimately, the study underscores that social mobility is not a linear or context-free process but a dynamic interplay of structure, agency, and temporality. By integrating qualitative insights, it becomes possible to expose the hidden pathways and lived complexities that quantitative models often obscure.
Scholars disagree on whether rising gender equality undermines family life (by eroding the traditional specialization of roles) or, conversely, renews it once men’s involvement in unpaid care catches up with women’s employment. Building on the ‘two-stage gender revolution’ perspective, this article distinguishes equality in the public sphere from equality in the domestic sphere and asks how different combinations of the two relate to perceived costs of parenthood. A hierarchical cluster analysis yields three regimes: ‘symmetric roles’ (Nordic countries), ‘women second shift’ (France, Belgium, Portugal, Austria), and ‘traditional arrangements’ (Ireland, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Netherlands). I then relate regimes to items capturing the perceived costs of parenthood (financial burden, loss of freedom, career limits). Results show a clear inverted-U relationship: among cohabiting parents, perceived costs are highest in the women second shift regime, while both the symmetric and traditional regimes exhibit lower perceived costs. The findings update earlier evidence linking equality to family pessimism by showing that where the second gender revolution (shared care) has advanced, parents report lower perceived constraints associated with having children, whereas stalled domestic change amplifies perceived costs.
