How did “capitalists”, “petty bourgeoisie”, and other class categories based on Marxist critiques of capitalism become highly visible in local society while communist regimes abolished capitalist institutions? Conventional approaches to class lack the necessary tools for unraveling such “Marxist classes”, let alone their impact on class formation in the common sociological sense. I use Weber, Foucault, and others (together with a study of the emergence of a “petty bourgeoisie” in a Chinese school system) to highlight the bureaucratic struggle of the state to classify everyone with a Marxist schema of classes. Spotlighted are “textual corroboration” and “workplace ascription” of class status, two everyday processes carried out by state representatives that normalized the class categories as well as muddied their boundaries. I contend that official conversion of jobholders into different kinds of predefined class subjects rendered any “class-in-itself” or “class-for-itself” virtually impossible. The conclusion suggests how further research on bureaucratic classification and Marxist classes can advance understanding of state-society relations under communism, especially in comparative terms.

Despite the ubiquity of illegality in today’s financial markets and the questions this raises with regard to the social legitimacy of today’s financial industry, systematic scrutiny of the phenomenon of financial crime is lacking in the field of sociology. One field of research in which the illegal dimensions of capitalist dynamics have long taken center stage is the field of white-collar crime research. This article makes available to economic sociologists an overview of the most important conceptual insights generated in the white-collar crime literature. In doing so, its aim is to provide economic sociologists with some orientation for future research on financial crime. Building on the insights generated in wcc literature, the article concludes by suggesting a number of promising avenues for future sociological research on the phenomenon of illegality in financial markets.

At the heart of the $2 trillion Islamic-finance industry is a ban on interest. But why is there only an Islamic ban on interest today? After all, for over a millennium, interest was also gravely sinful in Judaism and Christianity. While scholars have addressed the evolution of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic economic morality in isolation, very few since Weber have tackled the interest question directly and comparatively.

I argue that the fate of the religious interest ban has always depended on the fate of religious jurists. When religious jurists are absent, no systematic interest ban emerges. When religious jurists emerge as technical experts, the interest ban appears and thrives. And when religious jurists come under attack or lose their traditional role in society, the interest ban withers and dies.

To conclude, I call for a reconstruction of Weber’s theory of religion and economic morality that dissolves the tradition-modernity binary.

This article analyses the political struggles in and around the Warsaw taxi market. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and incorporating Albert Hirschman’s metaphor of political action as voice, I capture the position-taking of members of the taxi field, highlighting the different levels of involvement in the struggles. By distinguishing between different forms of voice—murmuring, jeering, whispering, hissing, grunting, and shouting—I show that the struggles that shape the Warsaw taxi market take the form of struggles over classifications and struggles over opportunities for exchange. I describe how market institutions are established and contested within the political field; enforced and contested within the bureaucratic field; and interpreted and contested within the juridical field. I thus contribute a field theory that investigates the links between fields and especially between economic fields and the state. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Warsaw between November 2012 and June 2013.

This article examines the relationship between the structure of politico-military movements and effective insurgent engagement in peace processes. Drawing on the experiences of Irish republicans and Basque separatists, I argue that centralized movement structures in which politicos wield influence over armed groups allow for effective coordination between movement wings in peace efforts while providing political leaders with credibility as interlocutors. In the Irish case, centralization enabled Sinn Fein leaders to ensure Provisional ira commitment to peace and to contain schism within the republican movement throughout the peace process. In the Basque case, movement decentralization created persistent coordination problems between wings during peace efforts, while eta’s unilateral reneging prevented political allies from establishing credibility as peacemakers. These cases show that while movement leaders untainted by direct association with armed groups may be more politically palatable than those with ties to “terrorists”, tainted leaders may make more credible partners for peace.

Practices within markets are widely regulated and sometimes contested on the basis of moral judgments. Moral entrepreneurs challenge markets and market practices while firms and industry actors defend them, leading to moral struggles opposing different orders of worth. Based on an historical case study, this paper develops a theoretical framework to study moral struggles in markets as social and political processes around commensurability. It identifies three core arenas in which moral struggles play out: ideas, where the morality of specific practices itself is contested and actors ground their moral claims in different institutional orders for legitimation; the economy, where the market viability of changing moral standards is at stake; and politics, where commensuration reflects political power struggles. Through a socio-historical analysis of the fight against battery cages in Swiss egg production in the 1970s and 1980s, the study fleshes out how this moral struggle played out along these dimensions, focusing on the competing discourses, strategies, and tactics of the main moral entrepreneurs and industry associations.

Power in sociological studies of memory is commonly understood as a function of political interests that are successfully framed as an inclusive and convincing story about selected elements of the past. By showing how negotiations of memory are driven by dynamics of symbolic exchange and by distinguishing techniques of narration emerging from this process, I develop a theoretical model that helps to better understand the locus of symbolic power in mnemonic agency. I consider the case of the plans surrounding a European history museum to show how persistent notions of cultural unity can be drafted in democratic societies.

Dominant theories fail to explain the use of terror during the Second Palestinian Intifada. Notably, they fail to explain Hamas’s abandonment of suicide attacks by 2005. We classified the universe of fatalities on both sides and examined the conflict’s patterns of lethal violence. Our analysis of fatality ratios and rates of change by fatality category supports a dual-arena theory of terror. Noting a rapid increase of indiscriminate Israeli civilian deaths and a relative evening out within this category in the conflict’s initial phase, we demonstrate that externally Hamas aimed to improve the balance of forces to compel Israel to negotiate on equal terms using the “out-suffering” mechanism. Internally, Hamas used terror to build confrontational capacity by attracting Palestinian factions to a resistance pole and isolating conciliatory elites. When their continued deployment became too costly relative to emerging options, the campaign was swiftly called off. In the end, while based on strategic calculations, Hamas’s use of terror proved to be a failure.

This paper examines the appropriation of French sociologists by US sociologists over the last four decades. Taking cues from scientometrics and from developments in the sociology of reception, it proposes a blueprint for the study of reception in times of mass digital data. Through this approach, the paper reveals two salient traits. First, out of the 200 authors of the sample, a small minority received considerable attention, while the others are virtually invisible. Second, when cited in the US, French authors are mobilized almost only as social theorists. The article then accounts for this peculiar reception by considering three levels: the intellectual structures of both fields, the local logics at play in the receiving field, and the “multiple lives” of a cited author.

This review explores contributions by science policy studies and the sociology of science to our understanding of the impact of governance on research content. Contributions are subsumed under two perspectives, namely an “impact of”—perspective that searches for effects of specific governance arrangements and an “impact on”—perspective that asks what factors contribute to the construction of research content and includes governance among them. Our review shows that little is known so far about the impact of governance on knowledge content. A research agenda does not necessarily need to include additional empirical phenomena but must address the macro-micro-macro link inherent to the question in its full complexity, and systematically exploit comparative approaches in order to establish causality. This requires interdisciplinary collaboration between science policy studies, the sociology of science, and bibliometrics, which all can contribute to the necessary analytical toolbox.

Matthew Wood’s recent article in the European Journal of Sociology is a useful addition to the secularization debate. There is value in studying ways in which religious organizations now attempt to re-enter the public arena and the secularizing consequences of such activity. However, there is no justification for framing that case as an indictment of either Bryan R. Wilson’s original 1966 presentation of the modern sociological secularization theory or the subsequent work of others in the same paradigm. This rejoinder explains Wilson’s apparent assuming rather than demonstrating the declining influence of religious institutions and concludes that his work can be augmented without asserting that he had missed something which fundamentally alters the secularization approach to religious change.

Opponents of commodification say that some things should not be for sale. Is citizenship one of them? Citizenship-by-investment schemes of naturalization allow investors virtually to “buy” citizenship. Revisiting objections to the older practice of selling another civic status—noble status—underscores many reasons why this trade may be regarded as problematic. The practice of selling citizenship is not only similar to that of selling honours but might also be thought wrong in analogous ways.