This paper aims to put contemporary political socialisation research in perspective. It offers a rapid overview of the crisis of the subfield after the 1970s and then shifts attention to post-crisis studies. Beginning with child political socialisation, it raises four issues: the use of theoretical frameworks derived from child psychology; the need to reconnect political socialisation to the sociology of family; the benefits of renewing methods for understanding the world of child politics; and a new account of social inequality in the process of political socialisation. It then explores lifelong political socialisation and how it has developed around four research dynamics: the study of civic and political socialisation of school-age adolescents and young adults; the generational renewal; the socialising effects of political mobilisation; and the processes and agents of the secondary political socialisation of adults. The final section raises the major question of what is political in political socialisation.

This paper aims to show how insurance mechanisms that historically propelled a conception of fairness based on solidarity and a collective approach shifted along the 20th century towards an idealistic adjustment to individual risk. Insurance originally assumed that, while individual hazards remained unknown, risk could be measured and managed on the aggregate. An examination of the proceedings of the American Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) during the 20th century demonstrates the slow crystallization of another conception of fairness, that aims at a scientific adjustment of insurance premiums to actual “individual risks.” I argue that this conception of fairness deconstructs the one based on solidarity. Big data technologies have further radicalized this shift. By aiming at predictive individual risk scores rather than average costs estimated on the aggregate, the algorithms contribute to replacing fairness as solidarity by the correctness of a computation.

This study advances an original theoretical framework to understand the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in political contention. It argues that we should not look only at the use of ICTs in contention, as technologies are not “born” to be used in and for political activism. Rather, people appropriate and manoeuvre technologies—some but not others—for such purposes, in specific contexts. This study proposes a relational understanding of ICT uses in contention, taking into account their technicalities and their sociality, as well as the transformation and actualisation that occurs between them. It suggests that an investigation necessitates the perception of communication technologies as a repertoire of contention on the basis of affordances that structure the possibilities of the use of technology. The study further presents an application of the framework in cases of protests in mainland China. Through fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this study indicates that the choice of (certain functions of) mobile phones as protest repertoire derives from a confluence of (a) a given social group’s habitus of media use that manifests particular affordances, and (b) the learned experience of the contested means of the past in official mass communication. It concludes that what people do and do not do with ICTs in political contention is significantly shaped by affordances and habitus, thereby revealing the dynamics behind repertoire selection and constraint.

What can a good’s durability tell us about its market organization? This paper argues that the socially expected durability of goods is one of their most important features. It illuminates temporal and material aspects of market organization and social change across different markets. While recent literature in the sociology of markets tends to emphasize financial goods, intangible assets, and the service economy, markets for material durable and nondurable consumer goods are still surprisingly pervasive in everyday life and in the household economy, as well as in modern economies’ basic infrastructure. Based on a comparison of the extreme cases of durable housing and fresh fish markets, we come to the general finding that the higher a good’s expected durability, the smaller the share of its new production will be and the larger its aftermarkets. Furthermore, it will be more tightly linked to credit and insurance markets, and its market will be more volatile in the short-term, but more inert in the long-term. Beyond this static distinction, we show how socio-technical mechanisms can “durabilize” or “dedurabilize” goods and hence change their market form. By comparing markets along the durability dimension, this paper contributes to a comparative sociology of market organization that goes beyond single-market studies, while at the same time opening up space for a more dynamic understanding of social change and market segmentation over time.

The Latin American model of vocational education has been widely portrayed as a homegrown success story, particularly by scholars and stakeholders who are aware of the region’s skill deficits, wary of alien solutions, and suspicious of institutional transfers more generally. Is the Latin American model really homegrown? I use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to trace the model’s mores and methods not to the New World but to Central Europe and go on to identify three different transmission paths in the 20th century: imitation by Latin Americans of German origin, descent, and/or training in the run-up to World War II; propagation by West German attachés and advisors in an effort to rehabilitate their country’s image in the wake of the war; and adaptation by local employers and policymakers—who received additional support from Germany—at the turn of the last century. The results suggest that institutional importation is less a discrete event or outcome to be avoided than an ongoing process that, first, entails translation, adaptation, and at times obfuscation by importers as well as exporters; and, second, is facilitated by immigrants, their descendants, and diplomats in transnational contact zones.

“Illiberalism” has assumed an invigorated if unanticipated significance in the 21st century. Aspects of illiberalism populate not only states long known as indifferent to such principles as personal liberty, human equality and the rule of law but have expanded in “liberal” democracies as their rulers employ purportedly “illiberal” practices more frequently than in the recent past. Indeed, the term “illiberal” seems to have lost its negative aura in the context of state action. We contend that illiberalism represents either an opposition to procedural democratic norms—as disruptive illiberalism—or an ideological struggle—termed ideological illiberalism. We first discuss the term as used in the vast literature on regime types in the debate on authoritarian/democratic hybrid-regimes. We then turn to the key puzzle in what one may call “illiberalism studies”: the rise of illiberal practices and policies in liberal democracies. To inform our analysis empirically, we investigate the ways in which illiberal arguments and institutions (notably camps) were deployed historically and in immigration policy. We conclude with an example of illiberal policy from modern day Hungary.

People use money in everyday life in ubiquitous ways. In addition, they know that money has quite different and multiple meanings in different social contexts, depending on the situation in which it is used. That said, what do people actually know about money, money creation, money backing and the institutional foundations of the monetary order? While contributions in the rapidly extending field of financial literacy have empirically studied people’s knowledge about mathematical and financial issues, people’s knowledge about the functioning of the money system and monetary institutions remained mostly unexplored. To improve our understanding of people’s knowledge of the money system and the most important money institutions, we questioned 2,000 individuals in Austria using a standardized population survey. In this paper, after a short critical review of the sociology of money and the literature on financial literacy, we present and critically discuss the results of the survey. We found that, independently of age, gender, education and income, people know very little about the money system or money institutions and mostly believe in money myths, such as the notion that money is still backed by gold. Finally, we discuss our empirical findings against the backdrop of the state of research on the sociology of money1.

Research on authoritarian legitimation suggests that rulers seek support through ideological, personalistic, performance-based, and procedural strategies. Typically, however, this work only considers the dynamics of legitimation between rulers and civilians. In contrast, this paper suggests that meso-level actors play a critical role in shaping legitimation from both above and below. Through an historical analysis of the French episcopate’s support for the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, I identify four practices that bolstered Vichy’s attempts to accrue legitimacy and simultaneously identify the consequences of these practices for the Church’s relationship with Jews. Public endorsements by the religious authorities for Marshal Pétain, their cooperation with the Vichy administration, the expression of shared values, and common rhetoric all contributed to the regime’s legitimation process while leading to a concomitant decline in the hierarchy’s ties to the rabbinate. These results suggest that attention to meso-level actors brings into relief important dynamics about how legitimation processes unfold in authoritarian settings while simultaneously contributing to research on the Holocaust in France.

Total institutions are by definition totalitarian, but not necessarily authoritarian. Voluntary total institutions consist of members who have chosen to enter, but what opportunities do they have to leave? This article addresses opportunities for exit and voice in Catholic monasteries within the Cistercian Order of Strict Observance. Monasteries have institutionalized important democratic processes regarding membership and leadership. Members are involved in decision-making through community bodies and discussions, but in many practical concerns, superiors may wrest control by neglecting to ask the community for alternative opinions. The superior’s decision-making style therefore crucially affects the range of democratic decision-making in individual monastic communities. Complete exits are common during the initial entry process. The cost of leaving is higher for full members, and the internal exit option to other monastic communities in the Order is therefore of great importance. It means that monastic communities cease to operate as monopolies.

Scholars have generally taken a “diffusionist” view of the rise of national standard languages—the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces (principally economic modernization) facilitate its diffusion. But such a view is too mechanistic and Eurocentric, and an examination of other, less-familiar cases lends itself to a revised interpretation. Amid Western imperialism and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a massive shift in language practices took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan. Bound for two millennia by their common use of Classical Chinese, elite literati in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all moved away from that abstruse lingua franca and turned to the creation of new national vernaculars. I argue for a more “integrationist” perspective: language nationalization was a state-led and top-down process directed at remaking society.

Materiality has been largely left out of the study of Muslim life in Europe, and limited to an etic rather than emic approach. In this paper, I analyse a conservative London mosque community (the East London Mosque) that depends on the material––what I term “ethical substance”––to reinforce its ascetic rejection of the world. Drawing from five months of ethnographic research in this mosque, I examine three aspects of materiality––clothing, the mosque building, and technology––in order to explore how the community negotiates its position in the city at hand, as well as more broadly vis-à-vis modernity. The mosque emerges as a site of discursive-material tension where ethics and locale intersect, and where intention (niyya) matters more than the constitution of objects. It elucidates European modernity as broader than liberal democratic ideals (i.e. in a community stressing a returns towards, rather than away from, tradition).

The battlefields are spaces of death and destruction. In the combat zone soldiers fight and kill while witnessing the death of their comrades. These unprecedented life experiences are regularly shaped by strong emotional responses. In this paper I analyse the complex emotional dynamics of fighting and killing in the combat zone. I explore the war-time experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought in the 1991-1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper is based on the interviews I conducted with the members of the Croatian Army and the Bosnian Serb Army who had direct experience of the battlefield. The focus is on the relationship between emotions and violence in the theatres of war with a spotlight on the personal experiences of fighting and killing. The paper challenges the existing interpretations of this phenomenon and argues that the killing in war is neither uniformly easy nor unvaryingly difficult but is context-dependent, variable and highly contingent. Furthermore, the acts of fighting and killing do not automatically trigger pre-existing and stable emotions but the violent processes themselves generate distinct emotional dynamics. Rather than simply following the violent actions emotions are in fact often made in the very acts of fighting and killing.