Acta Sociologica

Why do some individuals make economic choices aligning with rational choice principles while others regularly deviate from such norms? This paper addresses this question by applying Bourdieu's field theory to economic cognition, arguing that economic and cultural fields cultivate opposing dispositions through fundamentally inverse logics of accumulation. Drawing on three original studies with U.S. adults, I demonstrate that capital composition and field socialization systematically pattern economic decision-making in ways behavioural economics cannot explain through psychological mechanisms alone. Study 1 reveals a negative correlation between performance on probability-based tasks (blackjack) and aesthetic evaluation, suggesting competing rather than parallel cognitive competencies. Study 2 shows that economic capital predicts lower loss aversion while cultural capital predicts heightened loss sensitivity, controlling for risk tolerance and demographics. Study 3 demonstrates that occupational and educational field socialization predicts loss aversion above and beyond capital stocks, providing direct evidence for the habitus mechanism. These findings make three contributions. First, they provide quantitative, micro-cognitive evidence for Bourdieu's chiastic structure, demonstrating that opposing field logics generate measurable cognitive interference. Second, they advance culture and cognition scholarship by introducing relational opposition as an explanatory principle: dispositions optimized for one field create systematic disadvantages in another, not merely parallel differences. Third, they suggest implications for dual-process theory, indicating that automatic and controlled processes may be relationally structured by field position rather than simply varying in content. The results challenge behavioural economics' universal bias framework and illuminate how social structure penetrates economic cognition, with practical implications for financial literacy interventions in an increasingly financialized economy.

How organizations connect to multiple values is well explored, while the role of valuelessness and waste therein remains understudied. The purpose of this article is therefore to conceptualize the interrelations among multiple values, organizations, and waste. By cross-fertilizing sociological perspectives on organizations with insights from valuation studies, we inquire into how waste arises when organizations engage with multiple values. Drawing on systems theory, the conceptual proposal we offer highlights that organizations prioritize values contingently in valuation processes. These processes are guided by organizational programs that provide guidance, coordination, and justification while being applied in specific situations. We argue that these valuation processes lead to the interdependent construction of worth and waste and propose to distinguish between worthless (rejected) and worth-free (ignored or overlooked) waste. We employ a specific case—the hospital—to illustrate how our conceptual arguments apply. This illustration, with its underlying conceptual account, highlights the way in which multiple values and waste are interlinked through organizations, enriching our understanding of the intersection of multiple values, organization and waste in valuation processes.

This article delves into emergency remote education in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on 82 interviews with students, teachers, and other staff at 10 education programmes in the natural and social sciences and humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden, and drawing on Bourdieu's field concept, we analysed various stances regarding emergency remote education. Our analysis revealed four main strategies: (1) Though emergency remote education called for significant changes, the education programmes resisted transformation; (2) Emergency remote education necessitated significant changes, which the education programmes adapted to; (3) Emergency remote education demanded relatively small changes, yet the programmes were inclined to undergo larger transformations; and (4) Even if emergency remote education required only minor adjustments, the programmes resisted those changes. These strategies should be interpreted in the context of practical and organisational challenges within the programmes, and, most importantly, in relation to the programmes’ positions within the field of higher education.

The importance of education in the ‘schooled society’ leads to expectations of strong educational polarisation. Although the claim of educational polarisation receives little scientific support, this phenomenon still seems to be subjectively perceived. The social identity theory predicts that these perceptions are especially strong among the higher educated compared to the lower educated, due to their more powerful educational identity, and that these perceptions particularly concern cultural rather than economic distinctions between the two groups. Expectations are tested based on structural equation modelling of Dutch survey data (2019), and results confirm that the higher educated perceive more polarisation than the lower educated due to stronger educational identification. Although economic inequality between educational groups is still perceived as larger than their differences in cultural attitudes, only perceptions of the latter are affected by educational identities. This can lead to conflict in a society that is increasingly defined by the knowledge economy and politically occupied with cultural issues, failing to address the economic divide between the educational worlds.

Political gender differences have moved to the forefront of debates about politics and democracy. Scholars have documented that women are becoming more likely to vote, while men are more supportive of populist/radical right parties and positions, including elite distrust in mainstream politics. Past research has only been partly successful in explaining these differences, with most work concentrating on labour market-related economic explanations or value-based cultural factors. This paper shifts the attention to the family domain. Specifically, it investigates perceived risk of divorce/separation as a source of distrust in political institutions and actors. Three-wave panel data from Norway suggest this effect may not be strongly instantaneous, following short-term changes in risk. Rather, the effect develops over time and mainly among partnered fathers with persistently high levels of perceived divorce risk. This supports a ‘gendered post-divorce realities’ interpretation, under which male risks concerning post-divorce parental involvement matter politically among partnered fathers.

This article explores the potential connection between place and school performance. We conducted a statistical analysis of school results encompassing 420 of Norway's 429 municipalities. Based on this regression model, two socioeconomic similar municipalities were selected for qualitative comparison. In Sunplace, students scored considerably higher than expected; in Woodland, students scored considerably lower than expected. Subsequently, we analysed data from two schools’ catchment areas, conducted fieldwork, and interviewed local experts, students and teachers. Following the most similar case design, we sought differences between the two cases. The study is theoretically informed by Laurent Thévenot's pragmatic sociology, which provides a detailed conceptual framework for capturing people's diverse forms of engagement. Our findings suggest that Sunplace is a tightly integrated, egalitarian community whose residents take pride in their place. We propose that this pride and what we call confident collectivism extends into the school, which is characterised by discipline, a strong academic-pedagogical framing and confident students and staff. In contrast, Woodland is more loosely integrated and socially and culturally divided. Our interpretation is that there is an absence of pride, and what we call indecisive individualism might influence the school culture which is marked by a weak academic-pedagogical framing and uncertainty among students and teachers.

To what extent do people still regard welfare policies as a policy issue owned by left-wing parties? To answer this question, this article studies the extent to which people use government partisanship (right/left) as a shortcut to infer how much public money is allocated to different policy domains and, subsequently, to develop a stance concerning the adequacy of public budgets. We use Spain as a case study, and we build a large database merging 22 representative public opinion surveys (1993 to 2019) with budgetary data by year and policy sector. We find that people use government partisanship as a shortcut to evaluate the level of public spending on social areas: when there is a left-wing party in government, people tend to believe that enough money is being spent on welfare. When there is a right-wing party in government, people tend to consider social expenditure as too low. This relationship holds independently of the actual level of public expenditure and of the economic situation, but it does not hold for expenditure on non-social areas. That is, in Spain the left still ‘owns’ social policies, since people believe these policies are better funded when a left-wing party is in office no matter what the real level of social expenditure is.

This article reexamines Alvin W. Gouldner's Enter Plato as a neglected but significant contribution to the sociology of philosophy and argues for its renewed relevance in contemporary theory. Challenging one influential reading of Gouldner's work advanced by Camic and Gross, the article contends that Gouldner's primary aim is not to specify the mechanisms linking social structure to philosophical ideas in a Mertonian sense. Rather, Enter Plato should be understood as an early attempt to conceptualize philosophers as intellectuals who diagnose social problems and propose normative remedies. Drawing on a close reading of Enter Plato in conjunction with The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, the article reconstructs Gouldner's view of social theorists as “diagnosticians” and “therapists” whose ideas are rooted in underlying “operating metaphysics” shaped by social experience. It argues that Gouldner's perspective points toward a sociology of philosophy centered on intellectual agency, problem formulation, and normative intervention rather than on the social determination of ideas. The article further brings Gouldner into dialogue with Jeffrey C. Alexander's theory of “dramatic intellectuals,” highlighting important affinities between the two approaches. Both shift attention from explaining ideas by social conditions to analyzing how intellectuals construct meaning through narratives, symbolic distinctions, and engagement with audiences. While differences remain, particularly concerning how the reception of ideas is conceptualized, this comparison serves to clarify Gouldner's distinctive contribution. By foregrounding the meaning-making and orienting functions of social theory, the article argues for a reorientation of the sociology of philosophy toward the analysis of intellectual practices, narrative construction, and reception. In this light, Enter Plato emerges as an important precursor to a more dynamic and culturally oriented approach to the study of philosophy and social theory.

Prosocial behaviours are more commonly found among the higher educated. We examined to what extent genetic effects on prosocial behaviour captured by polygenic scores for educational attainment and cognitive performance can be detected. We apply a combination of an extended family approach using sibling fixed effects with polygenic scores to participants and their siblings in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. These models better capture shared environmental influences on prosocial behaviour. We find that those with a higher genetic propensity to spend more years in education were more likely to have engaged in forms of formal prosocial behaviours, that is, blood donation, charitable giving and volunteer work. We found no clear association between the polygenic score for educational attainment and informal helping. The polygenic score for educational attainment explained ∼2% of the variance in formal prosocial behaviour. The association was substantially reduced when the highest level of education respondents attained was taken into account. Shared environmental influences among siblings did not affect the association of cognitive performance with formal prosocial behaviour. Shared environmental influences were responsible for about one-quarter of the association between educational attainment and formal prosocial behaviour. While the polygenic score for educational attainment could explain as little as ∼2% of the variance in formal prosocial behaviour, including it in the model helps us to better understand the pathways of inter-generational transmission and direction of causality in the association between educational attainment and prosocial behaviour.

While research on income inequality and institutional trust mainly focuses on how actual changes in inequality and individuals’ perceptions affect trust, we know little about whether changes in wages relate to institutional trust. This study investigates how institutional trust develops across wage groups over time and whether substantial wage increases are associated with changes in institutional trust. Using data from the Panel Labour Market and Social Security (PASS), we show that wage inequality decreased in Germany between 2019 and 2023. While wage levels are positively associated with trust, decreases in wage inequality do not translate into increases in trust among low-wage workers. To the contrary, whose wages increased by approximately 20% over our observation period, show a decline in institutional trust. Fixed-effects regressions reveal a statistically significant, but only weak, association between wages and institutional trust. Overall, our findings suggest that even substantial wage increases, such as those from minimum wage reforms, may not strengthen institutional trust, highlighting the limits of economic interventions in shaping citizens’ perceptions of government.

Recent academic debates on intimacy emphasise that intimacy needs to be reconceptualised beyond long-term relationships. This study contributes to such reconceptualisation by coining the term intimability and exploring its implications based on interviews with 29 older people about couple dancing in Sweden. We show that older dancers find great pleasure in dancing with others but carefully avoid overt sexual signals or forming obligations outside the dance, such as long-term relationships. We model intimability on Simmel's concept sociability in order to capture how human beings enjoy being intimate and therefore arrange intimacy for its own sake. The concept draws attention to the temporary character of intimacy in dancing and the avoidance of sexual signals or forming obligations beyond the dance context. Similarly to how Simmel wrote about sociability, intimability becomes a world unto itself, and the links to other spheres of life are modulated to sustain the sense of temporary and non-obligational intimacy. We demonstrate how contextual factors are at play to sustain intimability, including the way communities are formed around dance activities and how existing long-term relationships are handled. Although this article examines couple dancing, we propose that the concept intimability can be applied beyond this specific context.

Despite extensive research on gender discrimination in hiring, little is known about how gender biases affect job applicants in older age. This study examines whether and how gendered hiring discrimination persists later in life, focusing on variation by the content of the work performed at the workplace, employer gender, and employer role. Drawing on a factorial survey experiment with 5017 Danish employers and 20,068 applicant evaluations, we assess hireability scores and the probability of being selected for applicants aged 45 to 75, representing later-career job applicants. Overall, gender differences in hireability scores are very small: female applicants are rated only slightly lower than males, and this subtle evaluative bias does not translate into lower selection probabilities. However, some context-specific patterns can be found: In production-oriented workplaces, female applicants receive significantly lower ratings and face a corresponding reduction in the likelihood of being selected. Female applicants are also rated somewhat lower by male employers and by workplace owners in production settings. The study does not find contexts in which male applicants are evaluated significantly lower than female applicants. Overall, we conclude that gender disparities in hiring in later career stages are context-specific and therefore largely similar to those documented in studies among younger, reproductive-age applicants.

Due to its often-ambiguous nature, workplace discrimination can be difficult to detect. Attributing situations to discrimination is the first step toward challenging and combatting such instances. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review synthesizes experimental research on the causal predictors of discrimination attributions in organizational settings. Our systematic literature search yielded 63 experimental studies from 31 articles published between 1999 and 2023, for a total of 20,725 participants across studies. These studies, conducted almost exclusively in the United States, focused primarily on the role of ambiguous information (action-related factors), the gender or racial prototypicality of targets (actor-related factors) and the unintended effects of pro-diversity policies (context-related factors). Findings indicate that status asymmetry and the prototypicality of victims and perpetrators increase the likelihood that a situation is considered discriminatory, while the presence of organizational diversity policies and equality frames tends to reduce it. We encourage future research to broaden its scope to include other countries and grounds of discrimination, and to pay more attention to differences in attributions across actors and contexts.

This article examines how the deployment of private security officers to patrol public spaces, and their use of body-worn cameras (BWCs), has become possible in Sweden where public video surveillance was long considered unthinkable and where the protection of privacy remains strong. We ask how the expansion of private security officers into public spaces can be understood, and how the use of BWCs by these officers has affected the nature and scope of public space surveillance. Based on interviews with private security officers and key stakeholders, as well as policy documents, we use the concept of function creep to explain how such new uses evolve over time, and we draw on the theory of the normalisation of the exceptional to understand why it has taken place. We refine the normalisation theory by arguing that the ‘normalisation of perceived threats’ can be driven by a series of criminal events, political responses, and dominant public discourses – rather than by a single exceptional event, as Flyghed originally proposed. In doing so, we contribute to the theoretical development of the normalisation of the exceptional and offer an empirically grounded analysis of how the implementation of BWCs in the private security industry, alongside the expansion of private security officers in public spaces, constitutes a new mode of policing and surveillance in Sweden. Our study thereby adds to the growing body of critical scholarship on BWCs.

Although considerable research looks at the effects of mobility on various outcomes, few studies differentiate between changes schools versus changing dwellings, even though the effects are likely to be different in terms of academic performance. In this paper, we rely on a random effects regression model using a longitudinal survey containing roughly 700,000 families over a 16-year period to differentiate between these two types of mobility. First, we look at the impact that family mobility, defined as a move by at least one parent and at least one child, has on the mathematics scores of the child. Second, we differentiate between residential mobility and school mobility. We find that moving schools and/or houses increases the likelihood of having poor mathematics scores. This effect is particularly evident when both a change in residence and switching schools occur concurrently, which has a multiplicative impact on mathematics scores.

This article advances a structural sociological diagnosis of contemporary late-modern societies as organized around the systematic reduction of friction. Across healthcare, digital platforms, workplaces, and governance, institutions increasingly treat resistance—understood as temporal limits, relational friction, institutional boundaries, and material constraints—as a design flaw to be eliminated rather than a condition to be negotiated. Drawing on theories of risk (Beck), governmentality (Foucault, Rose), control societies (Deleuze), social acceleration and resonance (Rosa), and liquid modernity (Bauman), the article argues that resistance plays a structural role in sustaining social integration. When external constraints are systematically removed, regulatory labor is not abolished but displaced inward: subjects must generate orientation, limits, and coherence internally, producing hypervigilance, internal overload, and weakened integration. The argument is illustrated through existing research on workplace burnout, the wellness industry, and platform-mediated labor, and is anchored in the Nordic paradox, whereby comprehensive welfare states coincide with rising rates of mental distress. The article reframes burnout, anxiety, and exhaustion away from individual-deficit models and toward a structural account of regulation under conditions of friction reduction, contributing to sociological debates on integration, subjectivity, and the institutional conditions for social coherence.