How do digital platforms affect coordination in the restaurant market? In particular, how do they reshape firms’ positions in the quality space and their dependence on both consumers’ valuations and competitors’ choices? Focusing on the case of a widely used platform for restaurant booking and reviewing, we analyze the dine-in services market in the city of Lille, France. In line with economic sociology’s definition of markets as concrete social spaces, we frame these restaurants as a producer market in which multiple quality conventions coexist. We use sequential mixed methods and data (observations and interviews, web-scraping and business data) to show that platforms rationalize firms’ practice of observing one another as a basis for making decisions on volume and quality. The rise of digital platforms provides producers with devices that amplify their view of competitors, standardize their offerings and support the stability of their business choices over time, conditional on spatial constraints and quality choices.

This introduction presents a novel framework that distinguishes three activities of organized crime (OC): production (creating goods and services), trade (moving products and people), and governance (regulating markets and controlling communities). These activities require different skills and give rise to three different types of OC groups. To illustrate some of the points, I make references to the papers published in this Special Issue, on erotic fiction in China by Wang and Evelyn; on falsified medicines production and trade between Asia and Europe by Hamill; on drugs retail and gang control of a neighbourhood in Marseilles by Rodgers and Jensen; and the cocaine international distribution chain by Feltran.

In sociology, aesthetics have become an important lens for exploring the sensory dimensions of political and economic processes, with research on urban aesthetics contributing significantly to this field. However, much of this work focuses on how aesthetic forms serve the interests of political and economic elites, portraying aesthetic value as a direct product of political ideologies. While these approaches have shown that urban aesthetics are shaped by power struggles, they pay limited theoretical attention to less straightforward aspects of aesthetic politics—such as cases where clashing values, imperatives, and commitments meet. This gap is particularly pronounced in places shaped by violent histories, where the value of urban beauty might be inevitably entangled with loss, ambivalence, and co-existence with unwanted materialities. This article proposes an approach that foregrounds the dilemmas and compromises inherent in urban aesthetic politics, focusing on the varied practices through which people negotiate how to care for urban aesthetic value over time. I develop this approach through a case study of Klaipėda, Lithuania—a city shaped by layered aesthetic transformations, from state annexation to socialist modernisation to post-Soviet nation-building and Europeanisation. Using mixed-methods research, the article highlights differences in how people articulate what counts as good and bad aesthetics and which forms of material care—or neglect—are “appropriate” to sustain the city’s desirable aesthetic appeal. In doing so, the article reveals complex gradations of value underlying seemingly coherent aesthetic ideals of Europeanness.

Marseille is a city that has long been sensationalistically associated in the public imagination with crime and drug dealing. This article begins by tracing the history of drug dealing and gang violence in the city, from its 19th century origins to the rise of what has been called the “French Connection” in the 1960s and 1970s, when Marseille played a central role in the global heroin trade. The city’s criminality subsequently became more local in scope in the 1980s and 1990s, and the second part of the article draws on recent research carried out in the Marseille cité of Félix-Pyat, a poor neighbourhood widely associated with gang violence and drug dealing, to explore the consequences of the changing nature of crime in the city for process of “criminal governance”. When considered historically and in relation to our previous research on gangs in Nicaragua and South Africa, we suggest that it might be appropriate to talk about there being “varieties” of criminal governance that come together as “assemblages” than can be constituted in fundamentally different ways.

Few social scientists expected another major inter-state war in Europe. The dominant positions either confine warfare to the dustbin of European history or downplay its significance in late modernity. Sociologists of war have been less surprised by recent developments, however. In a wider socio-historical context warfare remains a crucial catalyst of social change. No other social phenomenon has continuously influenced the social world to such an extent and this has been particularly the case in European history. In this article, I critically review recent developments in the sociology of war. I also look at the ways in which existing analytical tools can be deployed to explain the return of inter-state warfare in Europe. I argue that the integration of longue durée comparative historical sociology with micro-sociological scholarship on everyday behaviour in war is the best way forward to understanding the long-term dynamics of war and society.

Empires and nation states tend to be understood as two distinct types of political organization. The former are primarily associated with the premodern world, while the latter have come to be seen as political forms paradigmatic of the modern. While colonialism is a process associated with empires, it is more usually practised by modern nation states in their establishment of overseas empires. These empires are marked by a particular form of political economy—a colonial political economy—which determines the specificity of their political form as distinct from earlier empires. In this article, I examine the Mughal Empire of the premodern period in relation to the subsequent establishment of British colonial rule in India, and discuss the particularities of each in terms of the modes of political economy—moral and colonial—which were characteristic of their administration. In particular, I address the mobilization of the precepts of classical liberalism by the British, as demonstrated in the response of colonial administrators to incidences of dearth and famine, and contrast this with the modes of governance of the preceding Mughal Empire. The differences between them, I suggest, demonstrate that British colonial rule was a structurally distinct, modern type of empire.

Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

Classical social science viewed economic elites as the primary drivers of rapid economic change in Western Europe. Studies of late industrialization, however, tend to argue that the state, rather than economic elites, acts as the principal agent of development; in many late-developing contexts, economic elites may constitute an obstacle to rather than a catalyst of development. These analyses yield two questions that have yet to be thoroughly answered in the existing literature: 1) under what conditions are states able to act as the necessary agents of late development? And 2) who actually controls the state under these circumstances? This article addresses these questions through a case study of Francoist Spain. It articulates a path to state-led development in which, following class conflicts that diminish the power of economic elites, an educated “cultural” bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum) takes over the state and uses it as an agent of industrialization.

Since 2016, global police data have revealed a significant rise in cocaine production in Latin America, as well as an improvement in the drug’s purity, together with more frequent seizures in Europe and sharply increased consumption in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. This article argues that these changes have been driven by an understudied platformization of global cocaine logistics. This article examines the governance mechanisms of this changing trade. It consists of three parts. The first examines the governance structure of an emerging criminal player, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (“First Capital Command” (PCC)). The second introduces the Agência, a PCC regulatory body that manages drug trafficking via a platform model. The third and final part investigates criminal efforts to establish a global, multimodal logistics system; it demonstrates how the cocaine market has become integrated into formal economies and why it challenges existing power structures. The analysis draws on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2025, including interviews with former drug traffickers, law enforcement officers, and customs officials, as well as quantitative and documentary data on seizures, purity, and violence related to cocaine trafficking.

Based on an analysis of the situation in France after the uprising of May 13, 1958, this article analyzes the theoretical and empirical class of ambiguous political events. During such events, the holders of political power, faced with an actor who has assumed a political role by transgressing the established order, must take a stance. Since contradictory meanings can be attributed to the challenger’s actions based on the categories of thought constituting that order, the power holders experience an ambiguity: they are unable to say “how things stand with what is,” to use Luc Boltanski’s expression. The challenge, then, is to elucidate both the process through which they can leave their cognitive uncertainty behind and the conditions that would make that possible. This approach sheds light on the transition from one political order to another.

Risks and disputes are prevalent in the illegal online erotic fiction market due to the absence of state protection and enforcement, the lack of accepted criteria for evaluating product quality, the customisation of services, and widespread plagiarism. Drawing on insights from the sociological literature on signalling theory and Varese’s production–trade–governance framework, this article empirically investigates the strategies developed by author-sellers in this market to signal their trustworthiness to customers and resolve disputes. Agents and author-sellers send multiple signals to persuade potential buyers of their trustworthiness and ability, including by sharing writing samples created for previous clients, sharing their collective writing projects, disclosing past transaction records, and being selective about which orders to accept. Agents and author-sellers also offer multiple options for dispute resolution during the sales process, leverage information asymmetry to resolve disputes caused by delivery delays, and utilise neutralisation techniques to address disputes stemming from plagiarism. This research expands the literature on signalling theory, and its findings will hopefully inspire future studies of other illegal online markets.

This article investigates the organization of a transnational criminal enterprise through a detailed case study of Operation Singapore, a network producing and trafficking falsified pharmaceuticals from China to the United Kingdom. Drawing on law enforcement records, court transcripts, digital communications, and expert interviews, the study maps the structure and strategies of this criminal enterprise. It applies Peter Reuter’s theory of criminal organization, and Niles Breuer and Federico Varese’s typology of network forms to show how functional roles shape organizational structure: production was hierarchical and security-driven, while distribution was decentralized and transactional. Trust was not based on kinship or ethnicity but constructed through moral appeals and restricted information flows. The case reveals how criminal actors exploit legal frameworks and commercial infrastructures to mask illegal activity and blur boundaries between legal and illegal markets. These findings challenge static models of organized crime and call for a more dynamic, relational understanding of criminal enterprise.