Drawing on qualitative interviews in the UK and Denmark, we analyse how female influencers aged 50+ discuss the presentation of their bodies on Instagram. We advance Julia Twigg’s theorising of age ordering – body and dress norms devaluing older women – and Janet Finch’s concept of display by applying these to influencer culture in digital consumer society. Our findings illuminate participants’ desire to share positive experiences of being at the time of life they are, within the bodies that they are, and the normative constraints they experience on their dress and bodily display. We identify three non-exclusive display positions: ordering (accepting norms around older female bodies), reordering (negotiating these norms by striving for a youthful look), and disordering (challenging those norms). We suggest that reordering is the new ordering but find positions of disordering in all age groups, and examine how the digital and commercial context influences these displays of ageing.
This article examines how urban disorder is governed under conditions of contested legitimacy in a post-conflict city. Drawing on documentary analysis of institutional and policy materials from 2004 to 2025, it develops the concept of symbolic governance, defined as calibrated legitimacy management through which institutions regulate disorder while avoiding politically or reputationally risky intervention. Using Belfast’s Holyland district as an empirical site, the article traces how this logic operates across universities, policing, and local government. Revisiting social disorganisation theory, it argues that disorder is sustained not by weak social ties but by dense bonding networks within a demographically homogeneous enclave. Institutions respond through coordinated restraint and diffusion of responsibility, containing disorder within reputational thresholds while prioritising legitimacy over structural transformation.
While the legitimacy of key institutions of liberal democracy is under threat, we know little about differences in the trust placed in these institutions by elites and the population. We explore differences in trust between elites and the population (i.e. the elite–population trust gap) by combining a survey of 75 members of the power elite with data from the European Values Study in Denmark. Using principal component analysis, we construct a three-dimensional space of institutional trust in the population. The elite–population trust gap vastly exceeds trust gaps based on other socio-demographic factors (e.g. education), and almost no members of the power elite display a high degree of institutional mistrust. This trust gap is strongest in institutions in which elites themselves are embedded (e.g. the public sector, major companies), but insignificant when it comes to institutions not embedded within elite networks (e.g. social media, environmental organisations).
This paper explores how social network building, in functioning as an informal institutional mechanism, plays an important role in settings where rule-based formal institutions are incomplete or uneven in their coverage. Taking gift-giving as a proxy for social network investment, this study draws on a nationally representative household survey in China to examine its linkages with entrepreneurship. The results reveal a positive association between investing in social networks and both entrepreneurial participation and success. This relationship is statistically significant and robust against a battery of tests. By including regional institutional development in the empirical model, the interactions between different institutional layers are evaluated. Overall, this research indicates that stronger institutional development defines the boundary conditions of social network building in China.
The integration paradox – heightened exclusion among the most socio-economically integrated members of some, though not all, minority communities – challenges linear models of incorporation. This article reconceptualises the paradox through a Bourdieusian field-analytic lens, using latent profile analysis of UK survey data (N = 2535, including 109 Muslim respondents) to identify four configurations of belonging: Adaptive Mainstreamers, Empowered Pluralism, Individualised Assimilation and Double Alienation. British Muslims attain the capital-rich Empowered Pluralism configuration at least as often as others, yet report humiliation at nearly three times the odds of non-Muslims in the same configurations – a misrecognition gap concentrated among Adaptive Mainstreamers and absent within Empowered Pluralism, suggesting strongly resourced dual belonging operates protectively. Employment predicts capital-rich belonging only among respondents below their mid-fifties, consistent with hysteresis in capital convertibility. Heterogeneity analyses confine Double Alienation to foreign-born Muslims. The findings relocate the paradox from average attitudes to misrecognition at equal capital.
